


every precious failure and amateur cartography

by kenopsia (indie)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Explicit Sexual Content, Johnlock Roulette, M/M, Misgendering, Omega Verse, Omega/Omega, Oral Sex, Queer Omega Verse Dynamics, There Be Nothing Dubious About the Con Here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-15
Updated: 2014-03-14
Packaged: 2017-12-29 11:55:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 22,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1005129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John is not a fan of alphas. His beta flatmate, Sherlock is also not a fan of alphas. 221b is a no-knots-allowed club.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I am taking some liberties with Omegaverse biology because, um, this is a work of fiction. And because I don't think babies should ever use part of the gastro-intestinal tract as an escape hatch. Please forgive me.

John Watson is not a fan of alphas. He’s not bigoted, of course, he’s got an alpha sister and she’d give him a cuff round the ears if she thought there was some  _ism_ she hadn’t kicked out of him when he’d been a teenager.

He has plenty of alpha friends – hell, half of his brothers-in-arms are alphas, but as far as  _people John Watson wants in his bed_ , there is approximately one alpha on the list, and John explains him away as a statistical outlier. Bill Murray has an androgen-insensitivity and a tongue that could take the gold for England, were there any tongue-gymnastics sports that you could put on the telly pre-watershed. John considers him an honorary beta.

When Mike introduces John to Sherlock, who is tall and broad and smells like synthetic beta body wash, John makes the logical assumption.

John really isn’t sexist, or a transphobe. At their first stakeout, he says, “So you’re a beta, then,” to let him know that regardless of his knot, John’s not about to misgender him at every turn. Sherlock had turned a cool gaze on him as he practically sneered, “I’m flattered by your interest, but I think you should know, I’m married to my work.”  

John scoffed at him. “No, Sherlock. I just meant, it’s all fine.” And it had been. Fantastic, even. John gets kidnapped by Sherlock’s older brother, John shoots a cabbie, John is somehow ridiculously charmed by this horrible man who is all-go mania interspersed with bouts of lethargy where he camps on the couch so long John wonders if moss will grow on his dressing gown.

He dates Sarah, a beta, and Sherlock does his best to muck that up. Sherlock mucks it up, and John surprises himself by not minding. John spends a lot of time  _not minding_ the terrible things Sherlock does.

*

John comes home to the kitchen smelling like a mix of pheromones, Sherlock shifting liquids from one beaker to another, his cheeks flushed and looking like the advert for a  _My First Science_  kit. It’s the curls, he’s coming to recognize, in the morning, frizzed out, he looks so young. John is startled by a sudden whim – he could kiss him, he thinks. Walk right past him and drop a kiss on that fuzzy head on his way to the fridge.

He reminds himself that he  _does not kiss alphas._ He keeps telling himself that all day, over and over, like his tongue returning to poke at a cut inside his mouth. Concentric circles:  _you are not attracted to people-with-knots_ , he amends, remembering not to be rude, and then even further:   _you are not attracted to Sherlock Holmes_. He’s not trying to misgender Sherlock, but after four months of living with Sherlock, John still isn’t sure if he  _pretends_ to be a beta because it is more convenient for  _the work,_ or if he actively identifies as a beta.

Honestly, they don’t  _talk_ about permutations, after that initial awkward moment in the café that had cleared up approximately zero percent of John’s questions, but John owed Sherlock some privacy after he was kind enough not to mention the fact that John is queer, or at least, he doesn’t particularly align with typical alpha/omega dynamics.

*

John gets an updated glimpse into Sherlock’s sexuality during a case.

There is a dead omega in bed. There are rose petals trampled on the floor.

“This is a four,” Sherlock drawls, after his initial assessment of the room, the omega student, and her ransacked closet. “And I am being generous.”

“There’s no signs of forced entry, a ransacked closet, a computer tampered with but not stolen, and a dead omega who, by all reports, is adjusted as hell.” Lestrade huffs out through his mouth. “Alright, Sherlock. Go for the big reveal: you know you’re dying to.”

Sherlock is on fire in an instant: drops his drawl and picks up overdrive as he points out the string of details. “Two jobs and a full course load, her syllabi tacked side by side with her work schedule and colour coded notes. Apron with baking flour, her hat from a second café job in her top drawer.”

“Notes from the upcoming unit, laminated and near her bed for downtime, her dehumidifier running on full blast, and did you notice the desk? Smart kid, dedicated kid like that? She’s trying to keep her heat to a bare minimum, and study during. If she had the money for suppressors, she would be on them.”

When Sherlock gets going, he speaks faster than most people read. John grins in anticipation. He can tell from the speed that Sherlock’s deductions are moving along that things are getting good. “She definitely was not planning on spending her heat with any partner, and you will find her consent and contact info conspicuously missing from her wallet, I am sure.”

John is not following, but his eyes track the room as Sherlock points things out. Donovan, behind Sherlock, has a spine like a piano wire.

“What?” Lestrade asks. “Are you trying to call this a rape-gone-awry?”

Sherlock let out a long sigh. The sigh continues, and John wonders how long Sherlock can hold his breath, because he obviously has phenomenal lung capacity. “No,” he says finally, moving to the victims fridge. “Even an omega trying to keep a heat under forty eight hours wouldn’t have a fridge that looked like this - no complex carbs. She was actually still a good two days away from her heat. Look through her schedules,” Sherlock instructs. “Work and school. Find an overlap, there is a class she’s missed a few of lately and is falling behind in. She made an offer, probably to the professor or the TA, to share a heat in exchange for some kind of favor, or help, or the simple overlooking and refiling of attendance paperwork. She'd planned on acting the part for a day and a half, sure she'd be rid of him well before her actual estrus arrived. The plan probably came together in a moment of serendipity as she realized that his class sechedule lined up with her biology.”

Donovan makes a noise of protest. “Jump from  _smart_ and  _dedicated_ to  _omega whore_ rather quickly, you hysterogynistic jerk.”

Sherlock frowned. “You’ve rather shown your hand there, Donovan, with the words you’re putting in my mouth. The woman is not being supported by family, taking on an overly full course load and has a pair of jobs known for keeping extremely early and extremely late hours, respectively. I suspect to be maintaining the way she is, she’s trained herself to some form of polyphasic sleeping, very possibly of her own design. She keeps her heater off, habitually. She probably  _hates_ the loss of control inherent in the whole ordeal. If she thought that faking thirty hours of a heat was a plausible trade for getting her studies back in order,  _whore_ is certainly not among the most prominent thoughts I have about her.”

Donovan, by the end of Sherlock’s speech, looks floored, slack jawed. She snaps out of it quickly, bristling still. “Well, what would you call her, then?”

“Misguided. Naïve. If she thought she could fool an alpha for a day and a half with acting and a dehumidifier to take the blame for a lack of pheromones. Likely, she informed him that she typically had light, short heats and she runs it constantly to keep maximum mental facilities, but that wouldn’t fool any adult who had any experience. She may never have experienced a full heat in the presence of an alpha. Tragic.”

“And … the TA? Why kill her?” Greg Lestrade looks tired, like a well-fitting shirt that's been through the wash too many times. 

“I suspect he killed her when it became clear that she wasn’t actually on the brink of a heat, as she’d indicated to him when she’d made the offer today. Possibly an accident, in the moment.” Sherlock paces the room, swiveling on his heel every time he gets to the edge again. “But afterwards, he failed to have a typical remorse-reaction: she is neither posed to look like an accident, nor in any of the positions that usually indicate regret. He was calm enough to look through her computer for anything of academic importance that he might be interested in, and to find her wallet for her C&C card. Likely, when you find it, his name will be on it, and he took that with him. The closet is a last minute measure to make it look like a robbery gone wrong.”

“Alphas,” Sherlock says, in conclusion. “They’re completely useless. You can maneuver them anywhere with thought that they might get to press their genitals into something small, and their tiny little brains just catch fire when they think that may not be the case.”

Sally looks murderous as Sherlock turns on his heels. He doesn't say  _come along, John,_ like he's a hound, but it seems to hang in the air nonetheless. He nods at the two officers at the cene and scrambles to catch up. 

*

John’s therapist thinks John is obsessed with Sherlock.

John knows this because she’s written  _persistent obsession with flatmate,_ and John, who can be just as childish as Sherlock when he really puts his mind to it, tells her about him for another twenty minutes.

For the first time, she has to cut him off. He would be embarrassed, but he is still too busy, after a week, thinking about how Sherlock is strange and tactless and sees so often to miss all social cues, but somehow, that omega in uni, eighteen and stressed and desperate had somehow caught Sherlock’s sympathies. He thinks of Sherlock saying  _tragic_ and Donovan’s face, and he doesn’t explain all of that to Ella Thompson, because some things are private and she doesn’t know that he’s seen an omega murdered in her own bed so recently that he could draw her from memory against the back of his eyelids.

“Huh,” he muses, looking at the clock. “Ta very much,” he says, excusing himself. On the walk home, Sherlock’s voice echoes in his ears,  _not among the more prominent thoughts I had about her,_ and there is something in Sherlock that he’s missed, somehow.

*

“You’ve been somewhere unusual,” Sherlock says from the sofa. John assumes that he is on the couch, at least.

“Why are you sitting in the dark, Sherlock?” John asks, flipping on the light in the doorway. He’d meant to be discrete, of course, with his shopping, but trust Sherlock to sniff out his embarrassment before he even steps over the threshold.

Sherlock made a bored, vague loop with the arm dangling off the side of the sofa. “It was daytime, earlier.”

John edges towards the stairs, but Sherlock smells blood in the water. One sniff, John knows, will be like handing Sherlock a calendar with red letter days circled in triplicate. He may identify as a beta, but his biology is all alpha. It would be in poor taste for John to mention it.

“Let me have a look,” Sherlock says, planting himself between John and his exit.

“Not appropriate, Sherlock,” John says. He feels this might be kinder than calling his flatmate a wanker, but that step is rapidly approaching.

“Oh,” Sherlock says, voice going flat. “Biology, then. Dull.”

*

John can feel something in his blood moving restless, like he’s been carbonated. It always feels like this. At some point in the next forty-eight hours he is going to have to have an adult discussion with Sherlock, but Sherlock starts avoiding him.

As his heat draws near, and he hasn’t seen Sherlock in a solid thirty six hours, John assumes that Sherlock has decided that discretion is the better part of valor and has made a strategic retreat for a few days. He sends a text anyways:  **have everything you need from flat? locking door in 2 hrs.**

He’s not sweating yet when he gets a text back,  **Will be in late tonight. SH**

 **Don’t.** he texts back.  **haven’t gone into full ht in almost a yr, SH. whatever suprssrs yr on, not going to keep you out.**

**As usual, you see but do not observe. Put a wet towel across the crack under your door. Pheromones make me itchy. SH.**

John moans in despair, too close to his heat starting in full force to make other arrangements. He thinks about calling Harry, who would come sit outside his door if he asked. Embarrassingly enough, it wouldn’t be the first time she’d helped out with a heat – when he was first back in London he’d rode one out in her spare bedroom, all sisterly sniping aside when she brought him water and carded her hands through his hair as he tried to sleep fitfully.

He wavered for several minutes. If he called Harry, the whole thing was bound to be awkward, but she will surely arrive, make herself at home in their living room to revise her history textbook, which she rewrites all hours of the day, one eye on Sherlock’s door.

He’s even sure she won’t mention it for a few days out of her surprising dynamic etiquette. The tact his sister seems to lack in literally every other area in life seems to have all been allocated to gender matters.

The downside being his unruly flatmate who would scan her and give his most scathing assessment. He’d know in an instant: see the way she holds herself, or her rolled shirtsleeves, or the fact that she hasn’t had a haircut  _since._ Sherlock Holmes would squint at all of the tiny details and read the truth and of course he would say a terrible thing, ask if Clara is buried where their parents are, or something equally tactless and Harry would dissolve into a saltwater mess.

Instead, he drafts a text to her as well.  **Going to start my heat in abt an hr.**

 **Solo?** she asks, immediately. She’s nonplussed by the whole thing: John has always told her she was born to be a hystrologist, but she always laughs. “I’m a historian, John. Phonetically speaking, we’re practically the same thing.”

**Y. Can you call around 12 or 1 tmrrw? Possibility of some turbulence.**

**Want me to come over now?** she asks, but John doesn’t answer. He’s starting to feel overheated, so he pulls his jumper over his head, folding it neatly before sitting down to pant for a few minutes.

**No ty, just call if I don’t chk in pls.**

John puts his phone in a drawer and pads over in his trousers and vest to deal with the other minutia: water tucked between his headboard and the wall, other materials hefted up from their discrete box under the bed (the box had been labeled  _books/misc_ when he’d moved in; Sherlock had let him it be known in the following week that he had noticed John only had three books to his name).

John’s heart thudded heavily, making a swishing baseline reverberate in the hollow of his throat. In the next two hours, he would become a sweaty, needy mess, unable to do all but the most basic of functions. He wouldn’t even remember how much he liked his body when the entirety of it was a knot-free zone. Anxiety gripped him, but he did his best to relax.

If John had learned one thing, it was that his flatmate was singular. If someone he knew could ignore an omega in the flat in heat, John would put money on Sherlock, right after he put his money on Bill Murray.

He puts the towel across the door, climbs into his narrow bed, and settles in for a miserable weekend. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, guys, I thought I could finish this up in two chapters. Stick with me for a minute! Explicit consent is tricky! Feelings are tricky! A lot of things are tricky because I am hella dumb.

There is a wet towel under his door. His temperature is climbing, heat settling behind his eyes until his brain is uncomfortably muggy. John loses an article of clothing at a time until he reaches the point of limited brain function where instead of doing something normal for the evening, settling down with the paper or crap telly, his hands find his genitals.

It is a bit like being in secondary school; John feels a guilty thrill and jumps at every noise the flat makes, expecting his flatmate at every creaky pipe or cab he can hear outside. Sweat pools between his shoulder blades for agonizing minutes, stretching into hours as he manhandles himself. It’s _on_ rather than _in_ for the most part, which alphas who watch a lot of porn don’t typically get.

John’s cups his cock, demure and rosy and curled upwards into his hand. He’s been with alphas before, and they always mention his _sweet little cock_ but they rarely handle it like he wants it handled. At twenty he’d somehow acquired a twenty-five year old alpha to spend his heat with, gorgeous and lithe and he wanted her from somewhere close to his core: he was thirsty with wanting for her, and she’d leaned over, sexy, confident and smelling unmistakably of alpha pheromones. He’d fancied himself in love, for three glorious, terrible, sticky days.

“What do you want?” she’s whispered, coy and smiling, and he’d been completely unspooled. Breathless.  

“Will you,” he’d gasped, having trouble keeping track of his own thoughts with her nails raking across the back of his neck. Every inch of his skin was so sensitive. “Can you suck me?” he’d finally asked, and she’d laughed a scandalized laugh.

“Kinky,” she’d said, like it had been a joke, and he’d laughed it off with her, embarrassed. 

The rest of his heat had gone well enough, John supposed, although afterwards she’d tried to call him and he’d made excuses, he was bury, he had an exam coming up, he didn’t feel well, until she stopped inviting him out and John felt relieved.

His first blowjob had come from another omega, actually, in a fumbling uni experiment, outside of either of their heats. Afterwards she had leaned on his chest and said, “I’m not big on alphas, actually.” Her face had been flushed red with the warmth of the admission, and John remembers it fondly every time someone puts their mouth around him. “I just … I feel like… having genitals is humiliating enough. I shouldn’t have to beg, in bed.”

Which, admittedly, was a strange thought for an omega to have, seeing as most of them spend three or four days per quarter whispering _please please please_ even if there is no one there to plead with.

John won’t be whispering for a good twenty four hours. The first day of his heat is just uncomfortable. Honestly, if he had no other options, John could probably work through the first eighteen hours or so. He sat an exam once, until his beta instructor had excused him when other present alphas began to squirm in their seats.

By day two, he will be pressing foreign objects inside of himself, crying, cursing the day he was born – the whole thing is wretched and embarrassing, and the worst part: fertile. Harry, of course, will call around the stage change, like he’s asked her to, and he’s already informed her that he plans to ride it out himself. If she feels like something is off, and she has terrifying instincts, John knows she can trust him to climb through the window with her cricket bat from school strapped across her back.

*

Sherlock comes back to Baker street after midnight.

John’s just managed to doze off, and he wakes with a start when he hears the front door close behind him. His heart thuds in his tongue like he’s bitten it.

His mind swirls in anxiety with no resolution for fifteen minutes before his heart settles back into its familiar rhythm.

“John?” Sherlock says, his voice right outside John’s bedroom door. John doesn’t answer, but Sherlock waits patiently. John definitely doesn’t hear him move away, so he can only assume he is there, statue still.

“A bit not good, Sherlock.” John says, holding his breath, just in case Sherlock’s androgen gland is trying to seduce him through the door.

“Let me in. I brought you a takeaway.”

“No, Sherlock. But, ah, thank you.”

“John, I think I can help you.” Come to think of it, Sherlock sounds very calm, and John feels rather suspicious.

“Sherlock, what kind of suppressors are you on?” John demands, kicking out with suddenly restless legs; too much energy and nowhere to put it.

“I’m _not,_ John. Try not to be pedantic.”

If nothing else, curiosity gets John to his feet. He moves to open the door a crack, but puts his foot behind in to keep Sherlock out and his own nude body out of his (perceptive) line of sight. “What do you mean, you’re not…”

True to his word, Sherlock has a bag in his hands that smells divine. And he looks rather bored. “I mean there are more effective ways of keeping hormones at bay.”

That sets off alarm bells in John’s head. Behind the smell of fried food, which he always craves during his off-balance time, Sherlock smells less chemical than he usually does. It’s sweet. Fresh. John finds his mouth watering, and he’s not sure what he’s responding to.

“What?” John demands, when his brain catches up to what Sherlock’s just said. “You aren’t androgen insensitive – I’ve seen you use pheromones in your deductions. What’s more effective than suppressors?”

“That question is _a bit not good._ But not being an alpha helps, too,” Sherlock snarls, turning on his heel after he shoves the bag into John’s arms. “Goodnight John.”

*

There is too much food in the bag. If Sherlock were someone else, someone with regular human senses, John would have thought perhaps he hadn’t known what John would want, and maybe bought some extra things just in case. But Sherlock isn’t someone else, and he has picked out all of John’s favorite things with unfailing accuracy, and there are still extras.

Not only has Sherlock been incredibly thoughtful, John thinks, he’d been planning on eating with him.

Which is stupid, of course. Rude, definitely, to think John would want to eat with him during the first day of his grouchy, itchy heat. Except, Sherlock doesn’t do social norms, he does not pay attention to biology if it does not pertain to a crime, and he … he does not bring home take away.

John, because he is a git, has offended Sherlock, misgendered him again. John doesn’t care what kind of genitals Sherlock was born with, and he’s let him know, time and time again, that he considers him a beta for all intents and purposes. It’s the hormone deep, unconscious reactions he is trying to avoid.

Except…

Sherlock had looked clear eyed when he’d stood at John’s door.

And honestly, if he goes to visit Sherlock and they fall into bed, worst things have happened. He’s been knotted before, hundreds of times, probably, if you count individual instances and not a half-dozen blurry memories of heats once they get started. Harry will make sure John doesn’t get pregnant tomorrow if she has to pull someone out of him, herself.

It may be the heat leading him, but he feels sane enough. John puts on his dressing gown, gathers up the food, and makes his way across the flat.

John has never been in Sherlock’s room. He shuffles from foot to foot in front of Sherlock’s door. John is well aware of the moment Sherlock becomes aware of his presence, because he begins to play an atonal mess on his violin.

“Sherlock!” John hisses. “It’s not a decent hour for that!”

“Did you need something?” Sherlock asks, opening his door. Behind him, John can see his room which isn’t so much messy as _filled to the brim with things._

“I … uh, you forgot your dinner.” It sounds lame to his own ears. “I came to bring it to you.”

“No thank you,” Sherlock says, in a voice with no inflection. “I had a really big lunch.”

John goes to leave, but Sherlock says, “Wait,” and then John does, but maybe Sherlock hasn’t thought this far because he looks surprised that John is still there, and it takes him a moment to finish. “I just thought you might be itchy,” Sherlock blurts out awkwardly.

“I am unbearably itchy,” John admits.

*

Sherlock directs John to lie down on his bed, and John goes, his feet obeying without his brain. It’s positively pavlovian.

“Pull off your dressing gown.”

“I’m not wearing any—” John starts to protest.

“My bed has seen far worse experiments,” Sherlock says, and John lowers himself after wrapping his dressing gown awkwardly around his hips like a towel.

“You know I can’t stay long,” John says. He’s trying not to feel embarrassed, but Sherlock’s scrutiny – the weight of his full attention – is like a heat lamp. Damp is beginning to collect between his legs.

“Yes, I’ve seen your C&C.”

John goes to protest his flatmate’s gross invasion of privacy, but the bed shifts next to him, and Sherlock’s fingers come to rest briefly between his shoulder blades before they trail down his spine, and back up, in a gentle, unpredictable mix of fingertips and nails, sliding in a long, meandering path.

His skin is too warm under his hands, and he finds himself willing Sherlock’s hands lower, to the backs of his thighs and kneecaps and all of the things he shouldn’t be wanting, suspended because of his bloody heat.

John’s brain short circuits, and doesn’t come back online until he hears himself make a strange, needy noise, and Sherlock moves away.

“You should go,” Sherlock frowns, holding his hands clasped together at his throat.

John leaves, although it takes some convincing his legs that he’s on solid ground. They wobble embarrassingly as he goes into the hallway, where he doesn’t even bother with the gown.

Behind him, something whirs into life. John realizes, with a strange tightness in his chest, that it is a humidifier.

*

Sherlock leaves the flat around the point that John’s heat has reached the animalistic stage where he is rutting against his bed in an animalistic haze. He shouts to let John know he is going to the morgue, and to call if he needs anything.

“Not me!” he shouts, because he is a bastard, “but someone!”

John would be laughing if he wasn’t gritting his teeth against his own pillow. He gives one thump against the wall for _yes_ because that seems like a natural sort of shorthand. John, if he was functioning at normal hormone levels, would be grateful that Sherlock left before he devolved to crying.

At noon, his sister called, and he let it ring out before he text her **all well, tx** with shaky hands.

His phone rings again and he answers it with a huff. “Watson.”

“Watson,” she says back, airily. “Just calling my favorite brother to make sure he’s still lonely.”

“I did …” John says, very willfully not touching himself with his older sister on the phone. He breathes out harshly. “Text.”

“Any idiot can pretend to be you on text, John, as long as they misplace half of the middle vowels and don’t text back too quickly.”

“Well,” he says.

“Alright, Johnny, if you’re alright,” she says like a question.

“I’m fine. Thanks Harry.”

“Should I call back this time tomorrow?”

“No thanks. I think… I think I misunderstood. Hey, sis, I’ve really… Don’t want to be crass, but I’ve got to go.”

He hangs up on his laughing sister. 

*

John spends two days in unrelenting misery, interspersed with short naps he wakes up from sweatier than he drifted off. He cries and it’s stupid, so stupid, that his biology can turn him into this begging thing. He has a short, fat plug for his seam, which opens during his heat, dripping everywhere like some sort of slug.

The plug leaves his hands free and one claws at the skin of his torso – itchy, he imagines Sherlock’s hands for the sense-memory of their soothing properties, but he has to make do with only his own – and another for his cock, dabbing at his seam for lubrication when he begins to chafe. By the end of his heat, his abused cock is retracted almost completely back up to recover, and his seam is so unbelievably sore.

He feels clean for the first time in days when Sherlock comes back to the flat with a carton of milk. “I come bearing gifts,” he says, cautiously.

John, freshly showered, takes it from him. “No one’s going to make you itchy. I’ve been cleaning for an hour.”

John is in a pair of denims his sister bought him when he first came home. They were smaller than he’d been used to wearing – he’d lost so much muscle as he’d been laid up, recovering from surgery, and then more, as infection set in – but they were starting to fit snugly again, as he spent his time chasing his madman around the city.

“I didn’t mean to … earlier,” Sherlock said.

“No one’s going to make you talk about your feelings, either,” John shrugged. “We’ll pretend it never happened.”

“I mean,” Sherlock looked pained, as if each word was root canal, a painful extraction, “I didn’t plan on leaving you to deal alone.”

“We weren’t going to have sex, Sherlock,” John frowned.

“I know that!” Sherlock snapped. “I just meant to be present in case anything went wrong – but I couldn’t…”

This is it, John thought: this is your life now. You are not getting out of this room without talking about feelings and sexuality and gender expression, and for once, John fervently wished he could go back to 1995 to listen to Harry harping on and on.

And then, Sherlock throws him a curve ball. “I feared I would trigger a pseudo-heat with you nearby in a full on heat, and I spend a lot of time and chemicals keeping that from happening.”

*

Baker street returns to normal.

Sherlock texts him at the clinic with demands. Sherlock begins to label the plastic wrap in the fridge after John begins playing pop music at all hours of the day. John discovers, to his great alarm, that Sherlock keeps all stray bits of John found around the flat in baggies. He discovers this because an experiment gone awry has led to his room being overtaken by large, pointy spiders, of which John is unashamed to be completely terrified by.

 He prods at one, labeled with yesterday’s date. “Sherlock.”

“If you say _not good,_ John, I will personally rearrange your wardrobe out of whatever inane order you have your things organized by and into a hideousness index.”

“Well,” John sighs, “I’m glad you’re, uh, aware.”

“If I didn’t know which things weren’t socially acceptable, I wouldn’t know which ones to hide _in my private space,_ now would I? Speaking of _not good,_ ” Sherlock raises an eyebrow at John, who had been shamefully rifling through a box labeled _John._

“To be fair, it does have my name on it.”

“You are but one of the dozens – if not hundreds – of John’s I interact with on a daily basis.”

John raised an eyebrow, and Sherlock changed tactics, his face springing from disdainful to softened lines in an instant. Even knowing that Sherlock was replicating emotions like a child in a school play, it still worked on him.

“You’ll be grateful when I am called in to identify your remains and I don’t have any uncertainties.”

“You could probably identify me now if I just had the one pinky intact,” John grumbled.

Sherlock snatched up his hand and peered closely. “Probably,” he said, after a minute of careful observation. “Gun callus, scalpel scar, cuticles.”

John took his hand back. It felt strangely warm. “Good to know.”

“I should have you finger printed just in case. Wait here, John, I am going to fetch the ink.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am about to put out an ad for a fandom friend because I literally have no one to soundboard with me about the fic ideas I'm having trouble with. So, um, you are cordially e-vited to katiewont.tumblr.com to say hi and I will definitely love you forever.


	3. Chapter 3

John’s consent and contact card was all but empty when he came back from the war. In the hospital, they’d had to pull him off his suppressants to avoid a conflict with his pain meds, and they’d tripped a latent heat. Even for a bullet-riddled vet, no one was about to summon  Bill Murray from the front lines to help him deal with his unruly genitals.

He’d called his sister – there had been no one else.

Now, Sherlock could identify him by a single finger. Any of them. The knowledge should unsettle John, but instead it sits like a firefly in his rib cage – a warmth that feels like a secret. John finds himself looking down the list _Bill Murray, Nora and Mike Stamford, Harriet Watson,_ and thinking _who else could do that?_

*

Someone tries to blow them up.

When James Moriarty leaves, Sherlock moves to him like running water. “People will talk,” John says. Adrenaline keeps him upright, but it will be spent soon and there will be nothing but his own elastic muscles.

“People do little else,” he says, and wrenches John’s jacket off – throws it like it’s offended him, the explosives next. John’s always been able to rely on his own adrenaline and steady hands. He doesn’t have time for anything that wobbles, or whimpers, but on the cab ride home, he thinks Sherlock may have done both.

He ignores it because as long as John is there, Sherlock is allowed to wobble. That, John is starting to realize, is the point of John. It feels right, like something settled. He’d drifted after he had come home from a war; for so long, there hadn’t  _been_  any point to John. John had been a series of verbs of varying levels of difficulties, wake up, John, clean your teeth, John, go for a walk. He’d had to prompt himself into each one, over and over, grudgingly.

Somehow, John and Sherlock are laughing. That is a thing John does, now. They get off at Baker Street and John goes to get the shock blanket. He considers it something like a souvenir.

“I know that isn’t for me,” Sherlock frowns, but allows John to tuck it around him anyways, looking like a put-out feline. John knew something about cats though. He makes a judgment call and brushed the backs of his fingers over Sherlock’s forehead, meaning only to offer comfort, but stumbling onto an uncomfortable realization when Sherlock feels so much warmer than he’d expected.

John swallows around a suspicion. “Sherlock, when you said you spent a lot of time, and chemicals…”

“Oh, don’t talk to me about legalities, John, it’s tedious.”

“A strange conclusion to leap to,” John says, squinting at him. “So, shall I put you down as  _self-prescribed, self-made_  or both?”

“Honestly John,” Sherlock ground out, “don’t be ridiculous. You know who my father is. ”

John doesn’t actually, but that’s Sherlock. John is almost pleased that Sherlock assumed he would know. He doesn’t even have to ask: the question hovers heavy in the air.

“Mycroft and I’s father is the Holmes half of H&H Pharmaceuticals.”

John lets out a low whistle. “Your father is the world’s leading expert in heat-suppressors.”

Sherlock rolls his eyes. “Yes, John.”

John’s let Sherlock rabbit trail him from his original point. He redirects: “I think the stress may have derailed your chemically cultivated biology.”

Sherlock sharpens in an instant. There is no better word for it: his shoulders rise to points and his eyes narrow, plush curve of a mouth pressing itself flat. John can feel the heat transfer from a foot away.

“Who can I call for you? Sherlock?”

“You’ve got to be…” Sherlock muttered, launching himself to his feet and stumbling for the hallway. John stayed rooted, listening to the sounds of the tap in the loo running, and what he assumed was Sherlock splashing his own face.

John’s feet carry him to Sherlock, unbidden, when he hears him retch.

Sherlock is clutching a vial in one hand in a bloodless grip, and the other is braced above the sink.

“I, uh, don’t really think there’s anything to be done, at this point.”

“Oh, is that your professional opinion, _doctor?_ ” Sherlock sneers, wiping his mouth, and John swallows down a flash of anger.

“Yes, actually. You probably should have been letting yourself go into at least one per year. This might not be happening.”

“Having heats is rather counter-productive to the point of suppressors,” Sherlock says, and he has to pause twice to get the sentence out. “A large enough dose of… human chorionic gonadotropin could…”

“Or it could send you into a tailspin. It’s going to be unpredictable as it is.” John curls his hand around the vial and Sherlock flinches. He looks terrified, defeated, and desperate. John knows what it’s like to be hijacked by biology. “Let’s go turn on your dehumidifier. There’s still time to minimize.”

Sherlock follows him joylessly, like a herded animal following the curved path. “I’ve been on suppressors entirely since adulthood,” he tells John without looking at him. John adjusts the levels on his dehumidifier and it whirs to life, loudly, starting on the highest setting.

“Do you want to call your brother?”

“Out of the question.”

“I know you don’t get along, but this is –”

“Do _not_ say that this is different, John. You have no idea.”

“Well,” John challenges, “who is on your C&C? You’ve got a few hours to make that call.”

Sherlock mutters something into his hands. “Come again?”

“No one, John,” he enunciates, with razor-sharp vowels.

“Okay,” he says, calmly. “What would you like me to do? Shall I fetch you an aide, or call someone?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, John. Who would come?” Sherlock starts unwinding his scarf, and John notices the sweat collecting in the lines of his unhappy forehead.

“Don’t be stupid, Sherlock. Lestrade would. Mike, for another.”

Sherlock turns a familiar look on John, and he holds out his palms, smiling faintly. “Don’t deduce what you don’t want to know.”

He looks faintly disgusted. “That is quite enough, John.”

*

When John met Sebastian Wilkes, he’d leaned in like he had a secret, on their first meeting. “We all hated him, at school.”

 _Well,_ John thought. He moved his focus to the corner of his eye to see if Sherlock has responded in any way, and he hadn’t. His posture was school-boy straight. Sebastian went on: “He went into heat in a lab, once.

“This doesn’t seem the time or place to bring up childhood trauma,” John said, frowning.

“It wouldn’t be funny, of course,” Sebastian said, looking at John, “but we’d all been so sure he was an alpha, the whole thing was quite the head-trip.”

“Sounds like a riot,” he’d snarled, grabbing Sherlock’s hand. He could feel his pulse in his neck skyrocketing, and felt overheated, strangled by his jumper.

“What an…” John grumbled.

“Alpha.” Sherlock finishes.

“Alphas,” John agrees, grinning at his friend. They solved the case, because Sherlock is brilliant, and John added a few items to the list of things he will do in fear of Sherlock’s life. John finds himself thinking of it now. _Alphas,_ he’d snorted.

Sherlock’s biology right now is ticking, volatile. “I’m telling you, you can weather this one alone, but after so long on suppressants, I think you should call someone you trust.”

“There is no one, John. There is only you.”

*

Everything was so complicated, now. John hated the politics of heats: the way he felt on the second day, when everything was suspended underwater and there was nothing but thick, miry _want_ and no thought governing his behavior, just his layered hunger and wet genitals.

If Sherlock was going to dissolve into that – and considering the amount of suppressants he’d been on to forestall his heats indefinitely for so long – the next few days would be hellish. Sherlock would hate it, might hate himself upon coming up for air as his heat receded, but if John got involved, it would be more likely that he would hate him. 

It would be so much easier if he’d let him call someone: Lestrade, or a professional, hell, John had spent Mike Stamford’s last heat by his side as it began, just keeping him company as his wife was unavoidably detained by foul weather at the onset, and then his wife, beautiful and made of wide alpha planes, had asked him to stay. The whole thing had been lovely, and ended in a curry eaten in a nest of blankets. If John had called Mike or Nora he could rest assured that Sherlock would make it through his heat both safely (and likely pleasurably) but more importantly, with his friendship with John intact.

He had no such luck. Sherlock’s face was carved out of aluminium, like all it would take to crumple him would be to grip too tightly.

Sherlock clawed at his own neck, and John thought of the way that people touched others how they hoped to be touched, and how he’d come out of his comfort zone to find John when he was riding out his heat, simply to scratch his back.

“Come on,” John said, offering his friend his hand. “Let’s get you to your room.”

*

Sherlock was a bundle of nerves. “Biology is tedious,” he said, frozen in his doorway.

“It can be,” John allows, neutrally, turning the dial on his humidifier up to HIGH. “But I’d be lying if I said I’d never looked forward to a heat.”

Sherlock feigned disinterest as he pulled his sleeve close to his face to brush at some imagined imperfection. “I—” he said, face obscured by his wrist, “might say any number of improbable and inappropriate things in the next forty eight hours.”

John held both hands palm-up. “I won’t hold anything you say at face value. We’ll have a embargo on all emotions talk until after this is over.”

Sherlock let out a long breath, like a punctured thing, and John could hear his fingernails drag over the skin of his wrist.  “I’m going to go build you a sandwich. You should climb into a dressing gown, and adjust your card.”

*

John came back without a sandwich. They hadn’t been grocery shopping since the explosions, but he did find an apple and a jar of peanut butter. He went to carving with his pocket knife, and set them both on Sherlock’s night stand, on top of a coffee-splattered stack of papers, beside the snow globe of  a French attraction, and the small mountain of staples that held approximately nothing together.

Sherlock was in a dressing gown that John hadn’t seen previously. He had something like a collection. “I mean to say,” he said, as if he’d just arrived at the end of the speech and was summarizing. Perhaps he had been; it certainly would not be the first time he hadn’t stopped speaking just because John wasn’t in hearing range. “Perhaps I will ... make lewd suggestions. I will, ah, ask.”

Sherlock looked pink around the tips of his ears. John didn’t want to laugh at him, but the whole thing was so unbearable endearing. If he hadn’t looked so frazzled, John would have reminded him that the whole thing was _just transport_.

Beg, he wanted to correct: you’re going to beg. You’re going to cry. Instead, he leveled a look at him. “And? What do you want me to do?”

“It’s not like you’re physically  _equipped_ ,” Sherlock said, adding a cruel twist to the words. John heard his teeth snap at the end of the sentence, like the sharp crack of punctuation on an old typewriter.

John wasn’t phased, as he looked down at his arm, tucking his thumb into a fist exactly the way you wouldn’t for a fight. His hands were small, but capable. “Huh,” he mused. “That sort of looks like exactly what you’re going to want.”

“It’s hardly the same thing, John,” Sherlock says, as if John is being tedious. As if Sherlock isn’t nude under his robe. Like Sherlock has the upper hand – all of the upper hands – and doesn’t even need to grace John with his presence. John’s blood would be boiling under the heat of the condescension coming off of his friend in waves if he couldn’t see his trembling hands. He's trying to feel somewhat in control, he's not trying to make John feel small.

“Do you know that moment when you say, oh no, that couldn’t possibly fit, please remove that from my genitals immediately? And the alpha dick who happens to be in your bed says the worst possible combination of words.” Any combination will do. _Just take it, yes, so close, you’re doing great, you’ll love it when it’s settled, you look so lovely on my cock, needy little slut, you’ve been begging for this, oh, you were made for my knot._

Sherlock’s face is a storm cloud. He doesn’t have to say yes.

“Oh, what a co-incidence,” John says in a flat voice, “me too. And the thing about not being with an omega is, when you feel that feeling, we tend to say, _alright then, squeeze my free hand while I pull it out_. Either way. I’ll give you what you need or I’ll ignore you and keep you fed for three days while you sob. The question is, do you want me to be hands on, or do you just want me to bring you fluids and stand guard at the door?”

“It’s all going to get… rather undignified, isn’t it?” 

John nodded at him. He had to look up at him, but he tried not to peer up through his eyelashes, like a proper omega. This was not a normal situation, and it would not be fair of John to use a sudden onset heat to his own advantage. Any pair of mates would batten down the hatches for this kind of situation. Just because John had been battling a weird attraction to Sherlock’s asymmetrical slanted face and voice like a sultry bassline in 1940s jazz, did not mean anything. For all they’d talked about it, Sherlock might prefer betas, or brunettes or, hell, women. But mostly, as John understood it, there wasn't generally a preference.

All John knew was that his best friend had a complicated relationship with his own biology and a shared contempt for alphas in general, and more specifically, the alpha habit of delegating all reasoning and critical thinking skills to their knots.

“Yes,” he agreed. “but it might not be terrible.”

Sherlock inclined his head, and his face softened into an expression that still seemed miserable, but at least the affected contempt was gone. When he spoke, he sounded soft. Almost hesitant. The sound curled into him like a hot drink. “In that case, John… If you would be so kind…”

This time, when Sherlock’s hand went to his shoulder, John caught it. “Lay down Holmes. I know your skin is crawling.”

“Unbearably,” he groaned.

*

It was strange to be returning the favor. John had thought about it a few times since Sherlock had put his fingernails against his own skin, putting out some of his fires while stoking others.

John tries to put all of his mixed up, tangled thoughts away as he moves his hands to Sherlock’s back. He’s still covered by his gown across his shoulders, and John starts innocuously enough: with one palm across his left shoulder blade and the other dragging a blunt, straight path up and down the other shoulder. Sherlock twitches under his fingers, and John chases the twitch until he’s given most of his back the once over.

“You keep missing it,” Sherlock groans into the crook of his elbow, where his face is hidden. The back of his neck is a dull red, and John gives is a gentle rub with his short nails and Sherlock shudders violently beneath him, in a strange rolling spasm.

“Did I just his the spot or the self-destruct button?” John asks, fingers hovering a millimeter from the soft, stray hairs at the base of Sherlock’s skull, under his hairline, dying to try again.

“Nng,” Sherlock replies, and John brushes his thumb against Sherlock’s hairline, and down the first few inches of his spine. Sherlock squirms under his touch, and John has to bite into his lip to keep in the laugh that wants to come out as an amused exhalation. John brings his hands away, back to scratching, following cues and Sherlock’s own muscular tension.

“Pull this down,” he suggests, tugging at the fabric – it’s weird, slippery to the touch, but rough in others – and Sherlock complies not by shimmying it down his hips to drape over his bum like John had expected, but by flinging it off the side of his bed, to join the rest of his mess.

The skin across Sherlock’s back is so pale, like nothing warm has ever touched it but his great coat – not a lover’s touch, or the sun. Sherlock keeps arching, rising to meet him. He has four moles, and John avoids them all out of idle curiosity to see if Sherlock has mapped out the bits of himself that he wouldn’t see under many ordinary circumstances, and what he will deduce from his actions.

“How long has it been since you’ve had a proper heat?” John asks, trailing his fingers down the back of Sherlock’s arms in a way that makes his hand curl reflexively five or six times. He stays in the same place but adds pressure to stop tickling his friend.

“I was,” Sherlock says, still muffled. “Ah, in my twenties. I tried to disappear from familial obligations, and it took considerably longer than I’d anticipated to get my own version functional.”

John let out a low whistle. “Years?”

“I’m not worried about infertility.”

“Oh, I’m shocked,” John grins, and Sherlock looks at him over his arm, muscles soft, and Sherlock smiles back at him.

That’s not the only complication with long-term heat suppressants, but John isn’t sure where Sherlock’s hormones are, so it doesn’t seem like the time to pry. Things are going to get so literally and metaphorically messy in the upcoming week that he is doing his best to keep from betraying Sherlock’s trust. Using his chemical imbalance to pry into his medical and sexual history just doesn’t seem _on_ _._

*

“All of the itches have migrated.”

“Oh?” John says, pulling his hands back. Sherlock flips over onto his back before John has time to brace himself – for a creature who spends so much of his time sedentary, when Sherlock is ready to _move,_ it’s like a magic trick, _now you see me._

John draws his fingertips across Sherlock’s chest, his long lean torso a mess of cartography: knobby ribs and the occasional scar. He has a few scattered moles on the front, as well, and he scratches around them as well for a lark.

He tries to keep his eyes on Sherlock’s face, keep himself from looking downward. Sherlock’s eyes are closed, but knowing him, he’d feel the intensity of John’s gaze. He half expects him to shush him now, because he’s thinking too loudly.

Johns fingertips reach up to Sherlock’s neck, where he was clawing earlier. He brushes across the red marks with the callused flat of his thumb, and Sherlock’s neck jumps beneath his hands.

“I’d forgotten how overwhelming these things are.”

“Would you like me to leave you alone for a few hours, before things get…?”

“Please don’t,” Sherlock says.

John rests the pad of his index finger over Sherlock’s Adams apple and it trembles beneath him.

There’s something John’s wanted to do for some time, now, and it seems like the moment has finally come. Sherlock, stretched supine across the bed, his stomach bared beneath him in a way that made it seem completely vulnerable, and John trying and failing not to look at his cock, little and pink and demure at the fork of his legs, and John thinks to himself, if this is never going to happen again, he might as well go for it. John settles himself behind Sherlock, still fully clothed himself, and buries both hands in his hair.

“Oh!” Sherlock gasps, squeezing his eyes tightly shut. His pheromones, which have been hazy and faint, but obviously present, are starting to align. John loves the heady mix of omega scents, and that Sherlock-scent in particular, which he’s always kept masked under his clinical neutral wash. John puts all of his focus into carding through Sherlock’s silky hair, dragging careful touches across his scalp like he’s making a new discovery. For long minutes, Sherlock rocks his head back and forth in his hands, hands shifting restlessly for purchase in the sheets around him.

“Too much?” John asks, stilling.

“No, John. I need… I…”

John knows, actually. He can feel Sherlock’s pheromones now with some sense he can’t pin, like phantom hands pulling at his collar.

“In the past,” Sherlock says, “I have not particularly been stimulated by penetration.”

“Meaning, during heat you haven’t felt compelled to be penetrated?”

Sherlock flushed. “I have. But, I don’t typically…” Sherlock made a vague hand gesture that John assumed meant, _ejaculate._ It was funny: this man who could look unflinchingly into the heart of darkness, dissect patterns of criminal behavior with a look, and categorically knew of all the ways one could become deceased on an innocuous vacation to the tropics, but have him talking about his own preferences and genitals, and suddenly he was a school boy. “I just don’t want you to think you’re doing anything wrong.”

“Huh.” John moves, again, around Sherlock. He is beginning to feel like he’s in Sherlock’s orbit, as he nestles himself between Sherlock’s legs, bringing his face up close to Sherlock’s penis. “I’m an omega, Sherlock. I have no desire to treat your dick like it’s ornamental.”

John nosed Sherlock at the join, scented him at the heat of his groin. He pressed a kiss to Sherlock’s pelvis, feeling his pulse at the tip of his tongue. And then directed his attention to the organ in question. “Hello, lovely,” he smiled, before ghosting his lips across its peachy head. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I almost set this chapter to be 3/3 just to be sassy. ;)
> 
> As ever, come chat with me on tumblr (katiewont) where I will be avoiding writing by thinking about Mycroft Holmes.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just want to be clear without being crass that in my brain, and this fic, the basic omega setup is smallish penis (functionally similar to a clitoris -- most of the nerve endings are there... sometimes neglected...) a small padded place where testicles would be, undescended, and a vagina-like passage where a beta's perineum would be. (I don't have a biology degree but I just have a sneaking suspicion that babies and waste material SHOULD NOT SHARE AN ESCAPE HATCH.)

By the time John was an adult, John had learned something that was quite a letdown: Alphas, by and large, do not do participate in oral sex.

He hadn’t had anyone explain it to him during puberty, or presentation, with his beta mother and his alpha father who was too embarrassed to even bring up the area of sex with his omega son. It was Harry that dad related to.

Actually, it was Harry that got along with everyone, bypassing the Watson extended-family tradition of only being civil with one member at a time. Harry charmed mum, had things in common with dad, spun John around when she came home from uni on the weekends, even though by then John was a teenager and too big for that.

But even Harry, with her unapologetic predilection for members of her permutation and seemingly all-encompassing knowledge of all things related to gender and sexuality had never told him, “if you ever want to get off in someone’s mouth, Johnny, I’d recommend anything but an Alpha.”

*

Sherlock looked like a wonder: his hair splayed across his pillow like something posed and precise; his pillowcase the stark backdrop of hundreds of Fibonacci sequences. He looked like an equation.

John was still grinning up at him as he brushed his nose against the tip of his penis playfully. Sherlock’s eyes shuttered closed, and John put the tip against his bottom lip, humming a little. One of his hands curled around the back of Sherlock’s thigh, drawing lazy circles on his skin with his fingertips, and the spread across his largely vestigal bollocks, brushing his thumb over the flat, undescended curves of them. Sherlock, above him, squirms; “Yes, John, please.”

His Sherlock, who is made of jagged edges and self-control has already started to sound like he is losing the threads of coherent thought, and John’s heart gives a painful kick. “I’ve got you,” he murmurs, leaning forward to put the tip of him in his mouth, making a warm, wet curve around it.

The whole experience is surreal, and uniquely Sherlock. He smells like himself, more like himself than John has ever experiences, and tastes like skin and omega and John can’t help but panic a little: he wishes he could store this like a film, as it’s happening – lock it away in a mind-vault like Sherlock does. This may be his only chance to do this, to _have_ this, and after this heat, Sherlock may not even want to look at him.

John is going to do this right, because he has to, and because Sherlock deserves it. John moves his hands as he lowers himself down, his lips coming level with the base of Sherlock’s cock, swiping his tongue along the point of protrusion on the underside as the blunt tip pokes against the roof of his mouth. He traces the outline of Sherlock’s seam, which is damp and heated, brushing against it with his knuckles as he follows the path from one end of it to the other, past it to touch his arse, and coming back up, tickling his bollocks again as John begins to suckle in earnest.

Sherlock shifted his hips, arching off the bed, and John slipped his other hand under him, supporting him at the small of his back with a firm hand. Sherlock’s hands scrambled for purchase, warping his sheets in long grasping pulls. John imagines they were insanely expensive, on principal. His elbow, which is the only unclothed bit of him to touch Sherlock’s sheet, feels like it is resting on a cloud.

“John!” Sherlock says, and in his mouth it becomes a prayer, an invective, a swear. 

John moves up and down, swiftly, although Sherlock’s compact penis fits comfortably in his mouth, keeping a tight grip on his dense flesh. John pulls hard, putting enough suction in his mouth that Sherlock makes a startled noise, his hips surging up seemingly without his consent. “What do you need, Sherlock?”

“In,” he says, wild-eyed, and sitting up. He looks so disoriented (and almost silly, now that he’s up, legs splayed with his erection looking cheerful and kiss-flushed between his legs) that John wants to kiss his lower lip. Instead, he presses a quick parting kiss to Sherlock’s cock, and crawls up, putting his nose against Sherlock’s neck, where his scent glands are. He inhales deeply, hands wandering up Sherlock’s stomach, ribcage, and eventually landing at his shoulder. He is so hungry for Sherlock’s skin.

John fluttered his eyelashes over Sherlock’s clavicle, which is something he’d discovered he was wild about in uni, with his first omega girlfriend. She’d taken an art class that semester and he hadn’t been able to look at a paintbrush in a deft, capable hand without getting hard for years.

Sherlock lets out a low noise, and John can feel it resonate through his whole body. He pushed his mouth against the pulse of Sherlock’s neck, not quite a kiss, and moved to get up.

“What—?”

“Stay right here,” John says, grinning. “I’ll be right back.”

*

John does his best to hurry, collecting a thing or two from his personal supplies and almost tripping down the stairs on the way back down. He checks the front door for good measure, both of the locks slotted into place.

When he gets back to Sherlock’s room, John is taken aback by the sight. Sherlock appears to have taken the liberties of pressing half of his hand into his own seam. “John,” he groans as soon as he identifies him in the doorway. “Come help. This isn’t working,” he mewls pitifully.

“Course it isn’t,” John shrugs, trying to sound amused and not the closest he’s been to coming in his pants since his school years. “It’s hard to get the right angle without dislocating your shoulder.”

“Do something about it,” Sherlock nearly growls, and when John raises an eyebrow, he adds, “please.” in the most disingenuous voice John has heard come out of his mouth.

John moves to him, hand still moving between his legs, and climbs onto Sherlock’s bed. “Do you want me to, ah, continue what we were doing before, plus something for your internal needs, or do you want to try something else?”

Sherlock’s penis is still wet. John makes brief, hungry eye-contact with its little head, before looking back at Sherlock and waiting for his answer. Sherlock, wide eyed, simply stares at him. “That was…” he finally says, sounding shocked and mildly accusatory, “incredible.”

“We’ll get back to it, then, shall we?”

John puts one hand on the top of Sherlock’s thigh, tense, lean muscle rippling beneath his hand as he does, and the other hand slides down the slick entrance of his seam. His first finger eases in with no resistance, and he strokes Sherlock from the inside as he lowers his mouth back down onto the unyielding flesh  below him. He smiles around it as Sherlock’s breathing changes: little hiccupy breaths, intense, but calmer now that John is inside him, a bit.

John reaches one hand up, and rests it in the hollow at the base of Sherlock’s throat so he can be privy to every concave stutter of breath. John is so warm, from the factual heat at the tips of his ears to the less literal swirling in his stomach.

Early on in med school, John had been taught a song, the beat of which is the right tempo to give a person CPR. For some reason, that memory chooses that moment to filter up his consciousness, and John tries not to laugh as he starts up that tempo in undulating sucks _ah-ah-ah-ah staying alive._

John keeps a rhythm for long moments, stroking clockwise circles at Sherlock’s throat until Sherlock takes his hand, moves it, and for a second John thinks Sherlock is wordlessly asking him to stroke his face, as he removes it from his throat, up past his neck, chin… John almost chokes when Sherlock sucks down his two fingers. Sherlock seems to be mimicking John, keeping the same pace, doing the same things John is doing with his fluttering tongue.

John is glad his clothes are still on, because he’s embarrassingly hard, probably leaking. John groans around his mouthful of Sherlock, and beneath him, Sherlock’s abdomen trembles, like a plucked violin string. John wants to draw this out, but he knows, objectively, that he has at least forty-eight hours to go, so instead, he moves to put another finger in. As soon as he seats his hand against the Sherlock’s seam, his friend scrapes his teeth along the bottom of John’s fingers and John doesn’t have a free hand to palm his own cock, so instead he presses his hips down on Sherlock’s bed, trying to get the blunt pressure to take the edge off.

Sherlock says his name carefully, around a mouthful of his fingers, and John presses his forehead against Sherlock’s stomach, feeling the sparse, wiry hairs between Sherlock’s bellybutton and his penis against his nose. “Have pity,” Sherlock says, and it comes out muffled, but John moves anyways, easing his small hand inside of Sherlock, and moving his other hand out of Sherlock’s (damp, hot, glorious) mouth.

Nearly as soon as his hand is positioned where he knows it should be, the shape of it optimized for the blooming, blunt pressure where a knot would put it, and tugging gently outward to create a seal and press it tight against the opening of his seam from the inside, Sherlock’s cock begins to twitch in his mouth in tandem with the tightening of his pelvic floor muscles. “Mmmmm,” John mouthes around him, as Sherlock dissolves into a litany of _please please please John yes you are yes please._

When Sherlock’s minimal ejaculate arrives near the back of John’s mouth, he swallows around him, and rests his forehead again against Sherlock’s heaving tummy, without spitting him out. There is a little drool at the base of Sherlock and around John’s chin, but not a lot.

Sherlock, for his part, seems to be in a haze, and John closes his eyes while he waits for Sherlock to ask him to vacate. With a real knot, you might be stuck for an hour together, but John knows he usually tires of being knotted after about five minutes of aftershocks. John had once have a lover hold him in her mouth for the entirety of that five minutes and only the fact that John was so deeply closeted had kept him from announcing it to everyone he’d interacted with that month.

He breathed in and out slowly, through his nose, and kept his mouth snug but completely still around Sherlock’s cock. “John,” Sherlock croaked, his hands drawing through John’s hair. John wasn’t crazy about having his scalped touched, but he’d seen the way Sherlock obviously felt about the gesture and was touched by the reciprocal token all the same. He looked up at him, mouth still flush against his pelvic bone.

“You don’t have to…”

John tried to formulate a question with the top half of his face, eyes unconcerned and a questioning eyebrow. _Do you want me off?_

Sherlock sighed and laid backwards, still sending tender touches from behind John’s ears to the crown of his head, around and back down, across his temples. After a few minutes, and a neck cramp, Sherlock tugged him up by his ears, and John eased off at both points of contact, sitting up and flexing his cramping hand.

“May I take care of that?” he said, gesturing at John’s lower body.

John took a good look at him, now that they were both sitting up and at eye-level with each other. Sherlock, John was delighted to note, looked positively _wrecked._

He grinned at his friend as he went for his sweater, eager, and Sherlock took over the job, tugging at the cotton and tossing it to the floor. “I’ve not done this in quite some time,” Sherlock said, a caveat, “so the technique might take me a while to sort out.”

John looked down as Sherlock unbuttoned his trousers, the front of his cotton pants damp, and didn’t have the heart to tell him that Sherlock was going to _breathe on him_ and he was going to come like a sixth former.

“I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

Sherlock’s pupils were huge; medically implausible. Desire picked up right where it had left off when he’d sat still for long minutes with Sherlock at rest in his mouth, leaving sparks in its wake, like a waking limb. “John, I’ve never … I mean, I have, had experiences, but never… never anything like that. You have to, tell me what you like.”

John could feel his pulse in his fingertips, and brought one hand to Sherlock’s face, with a mischievous smile. “There is something.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> um, how do smut?
> 
> Hit me up at katiewont.tumblr.com
> 
> Literally all it takes to know like the entire plot or, like, what I have written so far is to say "hi" or "what do you have written so far?" because I seriously get fandom lonely.


	5. Chapter 5

John directs Sherlock up against his headboard, and wraps his hand around his bony ankle to put the sole of one foot against the other. Sherlock looks faintly amused, and frankly a little too smug for an omega that should still be softened and pliant by the wash of hormones.

“Why are you smirking?” John says, climbing into his lap after stepping out of his trousers and pants. John is delighted to discover that the fit is like a bespoke suit, his bum cradled in the warm geometric hollow of Sherlock’s pose, his thighs crossing over Sherlock’s.

Sherlock blinks in surprise at the way he and John are suddenly face to face. “This seems a little undignified.”

John snorts. “You just made a squishing sound, if we want to get technical about being undignified.”

Sherlock huffs and looks away.

“Hey,” John says, frowning. He puts two fingers against the line of Sherlock’s jaw to angle his face back towards himself. “Do you want me to stop?”

Sherlock doesn’t say yes, which seems promising, but he eventually does open his mouth so say, “This must look so … twee.”

John knows that attitude, dealt with it while training to be a doctor, when he’d had his first public queer relationship. He’d been with a gorgeous, funny minx of an omega, clever and mad as a coatrack, and well-muscled alphas were always quick to point out that he’d eventually “grow out of” his sexuality like a schoolgirl.

“Anyone that you’ve ever heard that turn of phrase from is probably off having insipid sex with people who are not Sherlock Holmes,” John says, in a soft voice. He brushes the pad of his thumb across Sherlock’s cheek, the skin soft and pliant over his prominent facial bones. Sherlock, to his mild surprise, turns in to the gesture.

John moves again to settle himself snugly into the negative space of Sherlock’s body, John’s legs curving behind the small of Sherlock’s back. Sherlock seemed to be experiencing the common omega experience of a heat negating the refractory period and he looked down to his compact, tidy erection with something like surprise. “That’s… something,” Sherlock mused.

John bites back a laugh, and instead, smudges a fluttering touch across it to make sure Sherlock isn’t too sensitive. “Ah,” Sherlock says on an exhale, most articulate.

“Yes?” he says, curling his hand more substantially around Sherlock’s unflagging penis.

“Please,” Sherlock sighs, leaning forward to touch his forehead to John’s. An errant curl ends up in John’s mouth. This time, John doesn’t force his laugh to retreat, and instead lets it come out in a genuinely joyful surge.

“What,” Sherlock bites out, petulantly, hurt or offended under the sneer. John doesn’t know when he’s learned that being openly wounded doesn’t get you far in life. He isn’t sure if he is allowed, or if Sherlock will hit him when he is in his right mind again, but he angles his face into the minimal airspace between them and kisses Sherlock’s plush, pouting bottom lip.

His best friend makes a noise of surprise into his mouth and John thinks _at least I’ll die having heard that sound_ and then Sherlock’s mouth becomes mobile against his, moving awkwardly at first, but eagerly. This kiss goes wet too soon, and Sherlock scrapes his teeth against John’s bottom lip that he finds cringingly strange.

Sherlock moves back and John has an apology in his mouth almost immediately, but instead of what he’d expects (from the more realistic _Sherlock sneering at him about sentiment, Sherlock’s cool veneer back in place over his hunger,_ to the outlandish _Sherlock’s head magically cleared of heat by John’s perceived ineptitude_ ) Sherlock looks away briefly, and speaks to the ceiling. “I need a do-over.”

John does not need to be asked twice, and blurs his mouth over Sherlock’s again, slowly, sweetly, and paired with a slow rocking of his pelvis against Sherlock’s.

Sherlock’s mouth moves against John’s tentatively this time, warm and agile and friendly, and John had a fleeting memory of watching him shoot off a deduction and wondering how those lips worked, decontextualized. He knew now, there was no going back; it was a fundamental change at a molecular level. John kisses him for long minutes, one hand curled around the back of Sherlock’s hair as his fingertips gently worked their way to his scalp, the other hand wrapped around their cocks, sliding together like a mirror of their mobile kisses.

John disengages from Sherlock’s mouth, lipping at his jaw and nosing at his neck, breathing hot air at the skin over his scent gland. John watches Sherlock’s pulse point jump into action beneath the ghost of a non-touch, just mobile carbon and nitrogen and oxygen, and scrapes his teeth across it, grinning against the hot skin of Sherlock’s collarbone when he lets out a strangled noise.

The room is swirling with pheromones and heat and genuine affection, and even Sherlock’s dehumidifier running on full blast can’t keep John from getting mixed up. “Want you,” he mutters, which was a last minute trade from the other phrase in his mouth. He wanted to spit it out, like an insect he’d suddenly felt in a swallow of tea, but he is clear headed enough to know that one is, well, probably true, but not appropriate during helping-a-friend-out sex, and any response wouldn’t really be Sherlock-with-the-light’s-on.

“Then have me,” he says, in a strange voice, and he seems to remember he has hands, bringing them up from John’s waist to shoulders in a slow path that raided gooseflesh on the side of his ribcage. John grips him tightly with the muscles of his thighs, and Sherlock sighs, face dropping to the nub of John’s shoulder.

John keeps rocking into Sherlock, genitals sliding like the tide, and Sherlock was the cliffside he was breaking against. John came with his face pressed against Sherlock’s neck, starbursts behind his eyes and his name like complicated benediction in his mouth, half prayer and half damnation. After a brief moment of tight-eyed recovery, he reaches both hands down to cup Sherlock, sliding and gripping until he follows John into sated bonelessness with a slew of consonants and very few vowels.

*

The heady mess of what John considers the “second day” comes sometime in the predawn hours, when Sherlock is trying to sleep, but instead is only succeeding in having the loudest stroppy silence that John had even been privy to. The change was immediately noticeable, like someone had snuffed out the fire that usually backlit Sherlock; his body was still there, but there was little of the luminosity that John had come to associate with him.

“John, John, John,” Sherlock cries, thrashing around, and unable to get comfortable.

“I’m here,” he assures him, even though he is inconsolable. It makes John sick to his stomach, for this misery to be paired inside Sherlock with a vast, untouchable lust. For hours, he gives Sherlock what he needs, but may or may not want. It’s the years of suppressants, John suspects, and the fact that Sherlock still had them in his system when the stress brought on a spontaneous heat. John suspects that means they’ve measured a Richter seven through a pillow to absorb the shock.

Sherlock calms for minutes at a time, clenching more and more weakly around John’s hand as the second day goes on, and later around one of John’s aids as John uses both of his hands to scratch gently at Sherlock’s irritated back, stomach, calves and temples.

Sometimes his name comes out in the babble, and John talks back to him. He makes him eat every few hours, pets his hip while he sleeps fitfully, sweaty, sheets tangled into wiry knots. On the third day, John – stressed and exhausted and unbearably hungry – feels Sherlock’s forehead and finds it cool to the touch while he naps on his side. The sheets are grimy despite John’s best efforts, and the fact that he’s gone through a dozen towels, piled in a disgusting heap a few feet from the bed.

He is though, equal parts relieved and head-buzzingly anxious, and he drags his small hand from Sherlock’s forehead into his hair, following the contours of his cranium with fingertips until Sherlock begins to rustle. “Hey,” he says. “I think you’ll be wanting a shower.”

Sherlock blinks slowly at him, before raising a hand in front of his face and curling his dexterous fingers, as if he is checking to make sure his body is once again synthesized with his brain, and that both are once again firmly under his control.

Sherlock mutters something that sounds like gratitude as he practically leaps off of his bed, not bothering with pants or a dressing gown. John strips the sheets when he goes, unease settling in a metallic tangle near his vocal chords as he tosses them into the pile of disgusting towels.

He practices what he is going to say while he does it, and because Sherlock takes a much longer shower than usually, John keeps practicing. In his head, he keeps rearranging all of the things he needs to say to Sherlock, changing the order, adding and deleting like a blog post.

When Sherlock finally comes back to his room, John has been lost in thought for some time, staring at his linens. He hovers in the door, flushed almost red with boiling water, and covered at the hips with the sole towel John had left in the bathroom. Before John has a chance to say any of it, Sherlock frowns deeply.

“John, I need you to go.” 

John should have expected that, but instead it comes out of left field to crash into his chest. Like a small meteor, or a stray bullet.

John goes.  


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, guys, I know it's been a minute. S3 really chewed me up.

“What did you cock-up this time?”

“The fact that my sister always assumes I’ve cocked something up when I come calling is not incentive for me to come visit,” John grumbled.

“Except, of course, when you have,” Harry pointed out. John hadn’t even brought a bag to keep this exact moment from happening.

“I’m not sure if I have,” John admitted, and his beautiful sister stepped aside to let him in.

*

After John showered, emerging smelling like strawberries and honey, Harry went to get a pack of cards, because if Watson’s have one thing in common, it’s the draw of the gamble. She went to get her bedside table jar of change and doles out equal measures of change. “Can I get you a  coffee?” she asked, before she sat down to deal.

John shook his head.

Harry settles down with a soft drink in hand. She told him a while ago, when she’d been serious about being sober for the first time, that she’d had to switch to diet beverages because she was always thirsty. “Okay, Johnny. What happened with your omega friend?”

“Can we at least pretend for the first round that’s not why I’m here?” John groaned.

“Sure.” Harry cut the deck a half dozen times. “Actually, no. Feel free to come by when things are going swimmingly to stop future assumptions. Nothing you can do about the present, though.”

John groaned. “I helped Sherlock through his heat, Harry.”

Harry looked unphased by the news that his presumed transbeta flatmate experiences heats. It was part of her charm; she fell apart at the sight of spiders and wine stains on tablecloths but in the face of bullet-wound aftercare and natural disasters and gender identity surprises, she was completely unflappable. “And?”

“And, I don’t know what it is going to do to our friendship,” he said, surveying his cards. Sherlock, he realized for the first time, would have an incredible brain for odds-games. He should take him to a casino one night, see how long it would take him to get thrown out.

“It’s hard to have casual sex with friends,” she said, “you know, for people like you.”

“People like me?” John bristled.

Harry laughed, “you know me too well to pretend I meant omegas. I meant people who are in love with their flatmates.”

“He asked me to leave after.” John said, and won everything because she must have assumed the fact that he couldn’t keep his eye from twitching was related to his cards.

“Sorry Johnny. You know my lilo is your lilo,” she said, flipping over another card. After a moment, she added, “You’re a good man, John.”

After John had won it all, and lost it all, and flopped back dramatically on her sofa, she tossed him his coat. “You need to get out.”

“I can’t think of anything I want to do right now besides mope, Harry.”

“Good thing I can,” she said, twisting her long hair to one side and tying it with an elastic. “Up, up, up.”

John groaned and put his jacket on, because old habits die hard, and following Harry’s lead was definitely an old habit.

*

John started to get suspicious as Harry drove past all the places he expected her to stop to watch a match, windows down because she’d always thought April wind was for appreciating. “Are we going where I think we are?”

Harry smirked at him in response, signaling and then merging into another lane.    

“I can’t believe you’re still a member.” John said, and started to feel anticipation tingle in his fingertips.

“I actually let it lapse for a while,” Harry admitted, as she pulled in to park at the London Gun Club. “When I was at my worst, I couldn’t keep a target in my sights. _That_ was rock bottom.”

“You told mum that rock bottom was missing her birthday party because you’d passed out in a root cellar.” John raised one eyebrow at her. 

“Well of _course_ I’d tell mum that. How well do you think she’d react if she knew I was more devastated by being unable to hit a grouse?”

“You’re wasted on a life of academia,” John laughed. It certainly wasn’t a new thought. John had grown up watching his alpha sister with unbridled jealousy: she’d had a motorbike when she was just a teen, and a string of scarred, bar fighting alphas that John had secretly harbored crushes on. She seemed to find some new adrenaline fix at every opportunity.

John had spent his entire adolescence wanting to _be_ her, and then she’d turned seventeen and decided her rebellious years were over, just like that. She’d went to King’s College with her six A-Levels, seemingly content while John was left reeling in the fact that no one seemed to be willing to extend the phrase “alphas will be alphas” to his own teenage behavior.

“I prefer my excitement to be on domestic soil,” Harry shrugged, stepping out of her car and towards the welcome center, leaving her little brother to trot out after her.

*

He didn’t think about Sherlock for a solid three hours, and it didn’t occur to him that he hadn’t thought about Sherlock until they were almost home, ears still ringing and a stupid grin on his face.

And only then because it hit him Harry had been en route to _Baker Street,_ instead of her flat. “Harry!” he yelped.

“You either need to talk to him or pick up some clothes,” she said, unflustered. “I’ll wait out here for fifteen minutes. Try not to get chucked out.”

John kissed her cheek. “You’re a goddess, Harry.”

“Yeah, yeah, let’s hear that outside a foxhole some time,” she groused, but she was smiling.

“Let’s have dinner,” he said.

“We’ll do something, Right now you need to go _talk to Sherlock._ ”

*

He let himself in, but was sure to make noise on the way up the stairs, so as not to surprise his flatmate.

He half-expected him to be out, solving a crime on his own to show John that his presence wasn’t necessary in some act of self-perseveration. That, or embroiled in half a dozen experiments as if nothing had happened.

What he hadn’t expected was to find the living room furniture squashed against the walls, the kitchen clean, all of the cans in the pantry, and Sherlock sitting in the middle of their newly cleared expanse of living room floor in the lotus pose, clearly deeply entrenched in his mind palace. To bring to perspective how ludicrous his life was, now that Sherlock was a part of it, Sherlock was draped in a white sheet, like a greek statue.

“Sherlock?” he asked, cautiously in the doorway. Sherlock didn’t move or acknowledge John’s presence in any way, but he was never sure exactly what percolated into Sherlock’s thoughts when he was like this, so he went ahead just in case. “I’m just here to get some clothes. Unless you’ve had enough… space.”

Sherlock’s eyes were open, but keenly focused on something John knew was not in this room, his hands twitching tensely at his side.

“Are you okay? Should I call your brother?”

 _That,_ apparently, was piercing enough.

“No, John,” Sherlock spat. “If you’re first resort when I am thinking is to _call Mycroft_ when I am _thinking,_ I am going to have to rethink my housing arrangements.”

“I’m sorry,” John said. “I’ll just get my things.”

“You can tell Harry she can leave,” Sherlock said, reclining into a dignified sprawl on the floor, and his genitals made a small but noticeable landmark under the expanse of thin white sheet. John stood there, his mouth not quite closed. Sherlock made a dismissive hand gesture.

John considered himself dismissed, and went upstairs. He pressed his eyes to the ceiling until the sun slanted through his blinds. In the morning he felt old, older than he had in a long time, unrested and rumbled and with joints that groaned when he lifted his arm for his jumper.

Sherlock was sitting outside his door when he opened it. Sherlock always gave John the impression of a bird with feathers pitched against the grain: he seemed so much larger than his mass. In a narrow hallway, he dominated the space unequivocally. “Hello,” John said, slowly.

“The problem, John,” Sherlock said, as if his position, tone, and the fact that he was still in his sheet from the day before at ten in the morning were all perfectly valid life choices. “Is that Moriarty is still at large, I do not know what sort of phone call would distract him from whatever he came to the pool to do.”

“Okay,” John said, He was accustomed to being a prop for Sherlock’s reasoning, providing him with an audience as he dragged himself through his own conclusions.

He continued: “The problem is expounded by the fact that that I have had an extremely draining biological reaction and the foyer of my mind palace is in disarray. I am figuratively having a lot of trouble accessing any facts of actual importance.”

“To be fair,” John frowned, latching onto the only thing Sherlock had said that he had a contribution in, “your _biological reaction_ was a bit out of scale because you’ve kept your biology under a militant chemical rule for over a decade.”

Sherlock’s focus tightened on John as he sprang to his feet, getting close to him; John’s breathing went on temporary hiatus as his blood bubbled to a boil under the heat of Sherlock’s gaze. “Go on,” Sherlock said, looming in John’s personal space.

John though about the desperate throes of Sherlock’s heat, crying and miserable and still unsatisfied even during orgasms. “I doubt if you were on a regular cycle, you would have had such an extreme reaction. Added to the fact that you were _still on heat-suppressants_ when you went into heat,” John said, concluding with a low whistle.

“Continue.” Sherlock demanded, in a ragged voice.

John shrugged. “That’s about it, mate. You can start yourself back up, but I’d recommend going to see a hysterologist first.”

“But in your medical opinion…”

“In my medical opinion, you should go off suppressants for some time. You should also have a full work-up done, but the least you can do for your reproductive system. But you don’t really keep me around for my medical expertise.”

“In your… _practical experience,_ then,” Sherlock said, and then paused before turning on his heel towards the sound of his phone.

John stood in the hallways with his pulse racing until it slowed before he followed Sherlock downstairs.

By the time he’d made it down to their disaster site of a living room, Sherlock was looking bleakly at the wall, phone pressed to the side of his head. “Oh,” he said, in a clipped voice, and then: “I can’t come, but I will send my field agent.”

John assumed that was him, and began paying closer attention to the conversation, but it is over quickly.

“I need you to go to Barts and fetch the samples Molly has for me,” he said, not looking at John. Something occurred to him, then. Sherlock wasn’t trying to drive him mad, Sherlock was _chafed and sore._

John’s feet carried him to the door as he turned that over in his mind.  “Fine, but when I get back, I want all of the food-stuffs back in the pantry—” he called upstairs as he opened the door, planning already his Tescos stop for something to soothe his fitful flatmate.

“Hello, John,” Mycroft said, pleasantly, but with a menacing grip on his umbrella.

“Hold please,” John replied, mechanically, and shut the door in his face. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think there's only a chapter or two left, here. 
> 
> Come chat on
> 
>  
> 
> [tumblr](katiewont.tumblr.com)
> 
>  
> 
> .


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John touches Sherlock on the face.

“Sherlock! Your brother is here.”

Mycroft, on the other side of the door, could undoubtedly hear him, but with tensions always so high between the brothers and with Sherlock in such an off kilter state, John didn’t want to take any chances. Also, John was possibly just as unsociable at times as his flatmate was, but because he tucked those bits of himself away while Sherlock tended to flaunt them, the contrast made people remember John as something gentler than he was.

John climbed back up the stairs. “Did you hear me, I said –” and stopped abruptly, as he found Sherlock with one hand twisted in his hair and several deep-furrow frown lines across his face.

“Tell him to leave, please.”

John didn’t argue; he turned on his heel and trotted right back down. When he opened the door, he eased his way out without opening the door very wide. “Hello, Mycroft.”

Mycroft nodded curtly at him. “Doctor Watson,” he said, acknowledgement without greeting.

“How can I be of service?” John said, pleasantly, unphased by Mycroft’s attempts to loom. John hadn’t been intimidated by him the first time he’d dragged him off to a warehouse to threaten him, and the fact that he was trying now was just silly.

“I thought I would visit with my petulant little brother. He’s been rather conspicuously absent for a number of days.” Mycroft said, rather delicately. His brolly today was a deep shade of navy with a sandalwood handle. John had noticed several different models on his person, but never one that seemed to match his suit and inner lining of his jacket so perfectly. He wondered for the first time if Mycroft had them custom made.

“Oh, I’m afraid Sherlock isn’t seeing anyone at the moment,” John said with a shrug.

“I thought as much.” Mycroft said, mouth tight at the corners. “In which case I was hoping you’d come with me.”

“No can do.” John said, turning to lock the door behind him. He added, on a lark: “You’re welcome to follow me to Tescos, if you like.”

Mycroft’s expression turned grim, as if presented with a much more terrible option than coming along to the corner store and he nodded stiffly, falling into step with John.

John had not planned on actually shopping at Tescos while Mycroft hovered behind him like a dour mosquito, managing to convey his displeasure with the soft _snick_ of expensive shoes behind him.

By the time they had arrived, Mycroft had arrived at his point, which was, as always, Sherlock. “My brother,” he said, as they neared the entrance. “and I have had a strained relationship since he was fourteen.”

“I’m going to stop you there,” John said, putting a hand up, feeling at the end of his fuse earlier than he normally did. “You wanted to drop by today to remind your brother and I that you know everything, and we have no privacy, etc. The message has been received. I’m not interested in you detailing Sherlock’s personal history to me. It’s not very brotherly. You might stop blaming your rocky relationship on whatever fight you lads had back in ’95 and start looking at the fact that your brother is a grown man and you cannot stop lording the fact that you have him under literal twenty-four hour surveillance and have no sense of personal boundaries. You know, in the present.”

Mycroft’s mouth snapped closed after an undignified period of time.

“If that’ll be all?”

“For the moment, Doctor Watson, I suppose that will be sufficient.”

*

John paced through the store, doing the shopping that had been neglected and depleted all week, until the tremor in his hand faded.

He’d overshot, in the end, propelled forward by his lingering anger and desire to postpone going home, and he’d kept picking up items as he wandered through the store. When he finally returned, both shoulders were aching.

“Sherlock?” he called softly from the stairs. The flat was in some semblance of order when he made it over the threshold, papers shuffled into stacks and all of the miscellany back in the pantry. He dropped off his bags in the kitchen, everything but the lotion he’d purchased for Sherlock.

“Up here,” Sherlock’s voice said from above, voice muffled by walls and carpets and possibly a pillow, and John started up to his room.

Sherlock, wrapped in his sheet, didn’t look up at John. His door was open, though, and John tapped his knuckles lightly on it. “Hey.”

Sherlock didn’t say _come in_ but he didn’t say _stay out_ either. John moved into his room.

“I’m sure he was careful not to embellish. Mycroft is particular about facts and compulsive about oversharing. He spent his whole childhood getting both of us in the soup.”

Sherlock looked embarrassed, and worn, like he still hadn’t recovered from his heat. John waited just inside the doorway. “Are you finished?”

“I don’t want to discuss your newfound insight into my childhood trauma,” Sherlock said. “I am trying to tell you that it came from a reputable source. Assimilate the information as you wish and we can go back to the way things were two weeks ago.”

“Is it my turn?” John asked.

Sherlock hadn’t looked at him yet, having chosen instead to fiddle with his massive collection of keys. “Do you require one?”

“I would like to say something, yes,” John said. He felt bruised inside, soft spaces carved out of him by the tone in Sherlock’s voice. John had never heard him sound defeated before, not even during the tear-stained catastrophe of his heat. At least that had been about his body and chemicals, not shame and… disappointment.

John was sure it was there. Hope flared into life inside of his bones. “I didn’t let your brother tell me anything about you,” he said, and Sherlock’s head swiveled to him like a spotlight. “You can, if you like. Or not. That’s the thing about your past; it belongs to you. And we can continue going on as we were, because I’ve never had a mate like you,” John said, suddenly feeling like he was skinless – made completely of exposed nerves and transparent thoughts – but determined to see things through. He’d dug shrapnel out of bloody men with his fingernails; he could talk about the things he wanted in secret: “But also, I’d be fine if we didn’t. It’s hardly a secret that I’m mad about you. It took Moriarty three seconds in a lab for him to see it.”

Sherlock made the beginnings of a sound and then faltered, blinking and twitching his mouth, for several long minutes.

“So what you’re in fact, saying is,” Sherlock said, just as John, humiliated to his toes, was about to make a subtle retreat.

“Yes?” John coaxed.

“That I’m your, that you.” Sherlock hadn’t stopped blinking.

“Yes,” he confirmed, and he’d be amused if he didn’t feel taut as a piano wire. “You are. I am.”

“Outside of…”

“Before that, and if it never happens again. If nothing sexual ever happens again.”

“And if I _wanted_ someth—no, don’t answer that.” Sherlock rubbed his face. “I need a moment to access some files,” he said, and John tossed him the smallest Tesco’s bag before he left him alone, feeling the hot swirl of anxiety as he closed the door behind him.

*

By the time Sherlock came down from his room, half dressed in pajama trousers and his dressing gown, it had been about an hour.

“My mind palace had to be reorganized,” Sherlock said, by way of greeting. John looked up from the crossword he was trying to unsuccessfully solve from the table, and he hovered from foot to foot.  “A lot of old entries had to be reexamined.”

“All is calm on the homefront, then?” John asked in a careful voice.

“I put the renovations on hold. I was trying to revisit my sexuality. It is… troublesome. All of the pertinent facts are in vaults.”

“Are they in vaults because you’d prefer not to think about them?”

“Obviously, John.”

“Then maybe you could leave them there.” John gave his words several moments to land as Sherlock angled his head as if readying himself to protest, but then failed to. He went on, “Skip the case study. If you don’t want to think of what the subject _did_ or _wanted,_ you can check with the subject to see what he _wants now._ ”

 

“What if the subject doesn’t know? Should he fill out a survey?”

John moved out of his chair and to Sherlock, stopping just shy of stepping on his toes. John brought his hand up, slowly, giving Sherlock time to flinch or duck out of the way, and meeting the warm skin of his face with his fingertips when he failed to do so. Sherlock closed his eyes. “Does the subject find this pleasant?”

Sherlock let out a little breath, and leaned into the touch. “He would give it a seven, on the scale of desirable sensations.”

“That’s a good start,” John said, moving away, feeling almost buoyant as he went to fill the kettle from the tap. “If the subject wants to head back into his vaults, that’s fine, but let him know if the subject wants to get snogged on the sofa, that option is also open.”

“John,” Sherlock said, his dressing gown pinched at his middle, where Sherlock had crossed his arms. One of them was wrapped tightly around the other elbow. John wasn’t Sherlock Holmes but he could see the nervous tension in every line of his body. “Somehow, you have become… essential to the work. To me. I have a great fondness, for you.”

John looked at him, patiently, with the start of a smile uncoiling. “I’ll be on the sofa.”

*

Sherlock followed in a few minutes, after John had turned the telly on. Sherlock focused on the makeover show like it was a crime scene. John let him, smiling as he watched along, content to sit with one leg in contact with Sherlock’s from knee to dressing gown for half an hour.

“Well?” Sherlock finally demanded, as if John was the limiting agent here, and John laughed.

“Come here, you,” he said, reeling him in warmly, by the cloth at his shoulders. John felt like a teenager, heart tapping out an amplified code in his ears. He met Sherlock’s mouth with a bump, and huffed a soft laugh as he went in again. Sherlock went immediately limp against him, like something liquid, as he mirrored John’s mouth.

It wasn’t the first time he’d kissed Sherlock, but it was the first time he didn’t have to worry about taking something he hadn’t been invited to. John brought a hand up to Sherlock’s neck, scratching gently at the skin above the omega scent gland turned pleasure receptor as he lost himself in the slow, delicious press of their mouths, all indulgent lips and a little slide of Sherlock’s tongue against his bottom lip. John opened his mouth and Sherlock prodded it with the same thoroughness he applied to everything he was interested in.

And he was. Interested. When Sherlock pulled away, he almost took John’s shirt with him, so tight was his clawed grip around the back hem of it. Sherlock’s eyes were comically wide.

“A nine,” Sherlock declared, not letting go of John. “Again?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [tumblr](katiewont.tumblr.com)


	8. Chapter 8

John was thrumming with the quiet simmer of both anticipation of what was to come and being completely content to stay where he was, _doing_ what he was, for the rest of his days.

He realized at some point, that Sherlock’s previous skirmishes with desire, sexuality, and the practical applications of the biology he seemed to keep bound up were all _in vaults._ John was, perhaps, for all intents and purposes, giving Sherlock something that was perhaps new to him. Not that he hadn’t been giving it a solid try before, but stumbling across that thought, he found himself moving differently, lighter. John felt carbonated, as if his very being was fizzing.

One of John’s hands found its way into Sherlock’s dressing gown, now untied and open, petting and scraping his blunt nails across Sherlock’s pectoral with a barely there pressure. Sherlock arched into John’s touch, and John grinned against his mouth.

“Yes?” he checked, barely moving scant millimeters from Sherlock’s lip. Sherlock fluttered his hands at the back of John’s shoulder, as if to tap out a tempo for him as he nullified the space John had made. John toyed with his lips, nuzzled into the side of his face, palmed again across Sherlock’ chest, this time reaching and dragging his nail against a nipple.

“Ah!” Sherlock said. He and John had been sitting beside each other up until that point, but Sherlock moved into John’s space gradually, slanting forwards until John was almost horizontal, and Sherlock followed suit. One of John’s legs ended up planted on the floor beside the sofa to give Sherlock room to situate himself between John’s legs.

John murmured his approval of this new situation, and his prick did the same, poking Sherlock gently in the abdomen, restrained only by John’s trousers and Sherlock’s cotton pajama bottoms. Sherlock let out a low laugh, and John got the impression that a large, stringed instrument was sitting on his chest, feeling it reverberate throughout his entire body.

Sherlock pushed himself up, bracing himself with one hand to the right of John’s head as the other gave a friendly how-do-you-do squeeze to John’ cock. John huffed out a laugh, hips snapping up against his will. John felt, a bit, like he was eighteen again, unhurried and amused.

“It is nice,” Sherlock mused, looking puzzled, “to participate without the estrus.”

“It is very nice,” John agreed, and knew he would feel emotionally exhausted if he really thought about what Sherlock was saying: half-mystified that being touched could be gratifying when our from the influence of biology. “Could be nicer,” he grinned.

Sherlock blushed from his chest to his ears. “If you are implying that you would be amenable to some version of intercourse, I must respectfully decline.”

“Woah, Sherlock, you don’t have to respectfully do anything,” John said, the heady, pleasant fog cultivated by Sherlock’s close proximity and skin contact starting to dry up as if touched by the sun. He started to sit up, and Sherlock had to sit up properly to let him. “We’re done if you want to be.”

Sherlock looked down, briefly, and John should have hit himself. “I forgot,” he said, dumbly.

Sherlock waved a hand vaguely. “It’s just a little irritated.”

“Did you use the cream I brought you?”

Sherlock looked guilty, and John immediately got up, adjusting himself shamelessly as he moved. “Stay right there,” he instructed. “I’m going to get it.”

*

When he came back, Sherlock was sitting on the couch primly, posture meticulous and both feet on the ground. His hair, which had been carelessly mussed a few minutes ago, had made it into some semblance of order. John was holding the cold tube in his hands, and Sherlock reached for it.

“You want it?” he asked, angling it by the cap toward Sherlock. “Or should I?”

Sherlock, who had probably just been finger combing his hair for maximum effect and had catalogued every facial nuance of which he was capable, ranking them on the axis of _percentage of time they help me get what I want,_ looked like he didn’t know what to do with his face. Finally, he leaned back. “You’re the medical professional.”

“That was smooth,” John grinned. “Want to pop out of your digs?”

Sherlock lifted himself enough to pull his cotton trousers down and drop them in a puddle in front of his feet. John was immediately aware of the fact that Sherlock wasn’t wearing any pants. His mouth went dry. “I’ll just – shall I?”

“Yes,” Sherlock agreed. “That would be the point of the interaction.”

John crouched before Sherlock, reverently, and poured some lotion from one hand to the other, cupping it in his hands for a moment before touching Sherlock, intimately, chastely, with a steady hand. The flesh of his cock didn’t look as abused as it had immediately after, but John was careful with it, soft and small in his hands as he rubbed the fluffy cream all over, and then behind to move one gentle hand to his bum, only daring to brush his fingers soothingly over the red skin of his cleft.

Sherlock looked embarrassed, and relieved, before excusing himself upstairs to his room without so much as a look back.

*

“Sherlock, there’s an email here. Maybe interesting.”

“Probably not,” Sherlock drawled. He seemed to have recovered from his unexpected heat. He looked remarkably well rested for a man who had retired to his room and then promptly got to work making excessive amounts of noise for eight hours. He had been typing at length for some time, pausing only to make hold an old key to the light or run his fingers across the teeth of another. “I’m finishing a comprehensive examination of the keys of the eighteen hundreds to the current models.”

“There’s a zoo manager who suspects one of his underlings of using a dead polar bear cub as a drug mule.”

Sherlock sneered convincingly, but his attention to the keys faltered.

“I’ll just tell him you’re not interested.”

Sherlock put his coat on.

*

On the train out to the country, Sherlock found them a carriage and sprawled himself across more seats than one person needed. “I have revisited my assessment of the Donovan-Anderson affair.”

“That was … quite a non sequitur,” John said, “but I’ll bite.”

“Oh,” Sherlock said, flapping his hand as if to wave away John’s pedantic quibble, “I was thinking about sex. It transitioned perfectly in my head.”

“You were…” John trailed off, heat sparking behind his eyes.

“ _Anyway._ Two weeks after I accused them of having an affair, Donovan came in to work mid-week with evidence of pet dander consistent with what Anderson typically has clinging to his trousers, but Anderson had recycled both his trousers and his shirt from the previous day.”

“So they stayed at her place?” John asked, content to be Sherlock’s _yes, tell me more_ arrow for Sherlock’s flow of information. He was half convinced it was the main reason Sherlock kept him around.

“No, Anderson and the cat are cohabitating too regularly for that. Donovan stayed at Anderson’s while he was unavoidably detained.”

“Huh,” John said. “Well that’s interesting.”

“It hadn’t occurred to me until this recent turn of events.”

John blinked at him. “You’re saying you never met _anyone_ who was queer?”

Sherlock appropriated more chairs, like an amoeba. “It’s not about sexual preference. I solve crimes. I frequently run into jealously over infidelity as motive. Rarely do I run into happily adulterous relationships.”

John let out a huff of laughter at Sherlock’s formal phrasing. And then, after a minute: “So, thinking about sex,” he ventured with a grin.

Sherlock pretended to be deeply engrossed in his paper.

*

They spent three days in the countryside. They performed an autopsy of an Okapi, to see if there were any similarities. They went on a long, wet stakeout. Sherlock put on his best disguise yet. Not only did the case require him to impersonate a member of the Wildlife Preservation Society, but for some inexplicable reason, he deemed it necessary to assume the identity of a _female_ member of the WPS, as he went door-to-door warning citizens of an escaped lion. _People don’t like answering questions. They like contradicting you._

He’d also informed one woman that he husband had lost his job some time ago and didn’t know how to tell her. To John’s visceral surprise, she’s insisted they stay and have a coffeecake with her, thanking him for his kindness.

John was chuffed as hell to tell Sherlock he made _quite_ an attractive lady in uniform, and did not hesitate to snap a photo of Sherlock and the newly discovered – and still breathing! – young polar bear. Who appeared to be a new household pet, not a pocket for cocaine.

“Dull,” Sherlock said, reading John’s blog about the ordeal over his shoulder, but he was smiling. The zoo manager had given them a lifetime pass to the park, and John was already working out a way to get Sherlock to behave on a crime-free day.

“That’s the life we lead,” John sighed. “Polar bears and murders. If only the criminals would do something really public spirited and invent a conspiracy for you.”

“There’s always my birthday,” Sherlock suggested.

Sherlock seemed to have retreated into himself since they’d arrived at home, shied away from their fledgling relationship. John wasn’t about to pry, but he’d made sure to leave his hand in the middle seat between them on the cab, in touching distance if Sherlock had the urge to touch.

“Someone paid a hefty fee to get a zookeeper to heavily sedate a polar bear, declare him dead, pay off the driver that was to transport him to the autopsy center and the autopsy technician, and planted drugs in both places to make it look like a smuggling operation while he absconded with the cub.” John summarized. “Which he was fishing with in his private creek when we arrived.”

Sherlock let out a put upon sigh. “They can’t all be tens.”

Something occurred to John, the lack of a scent he’d been getting acclimatized to over the past four days. “You’re back on your suppressants.”

“The default state of things.”

“You were off –”

“During an anomaly heat, because it was already happening. The cause and effect were not reversed.”

“Of course, but, I’d thought.”

A glass shattered. It took John a sixteenth note to realize Sherlock had thrown it. “You have my attention,” John said calmly.

Sherlock looked down at the floor in surprise. “That just… happened.”

“Not particularly appropriate,” John said. “But go on.”

“I need you to put aside the preoccupation with my heat if we are to continue to engage in acts of sexual congress.”

“I told you I don’t care, Sherlock.”

“And yet, you keep asking about it. Thinking about it.”

“Your health, Sherlock. That’s what I’m worried about.”

Sherlock closed his eyes. “I almost wish you’d let Mycroft explain.”

John pushed himself to his feet. “Stop this, Sherlock. Your case is over, you can get a good night’s sleep. We can talk about it –”

“Never. We’ll talk about it never if we wait until I’m well rested or well fed or not having a panic attack.” Sherlock said, hands flexing at his sides. There are shards of glass from just in front of him to almost the stairs down to the front door.

“Alright,” John said.

“Mycroft didn’t come home when I presented. He was … well, he has always said he was unavoidably detained, but I have long suspected he was in rut.”

John’s brain had already arrived at the moral of the story by this point. Mycroft hadn’t made it home for his first heat. John’s stomach rolled at the thought. Harry had been on a Uni tour at the time in Paris with her sixth form group. One of the chaperones had made the five hour trip back to London with her. She still ribbed him about it sometimes, but there would have been no other conclusion. If she’s been in America, she could have bumped someone off a full flight to get to him.  

Sherlock soldiered on, pulling at the sleeves of his own dressing gown. “We’ve never recovered. We used to be very close.”

John felt a sharp pang in his ribcage. “I couldn’t forgive Harry, if she hadn’t made it home.” He knows it down to his toes.

Sherlock lifted a single shoulder. “I think I have. The tension is just too thick. It makes both of us too irritable to interact properly, even with my suppressants. There was virtually no change when he was on them as well, besides the side effects, so he discontinued taking them after Uni. It's why we see each other so rarely. He stalks me to compensate. He feels like, on an instinctual level, he's my alpha.”

John wanted to ask about the _side effects,_ but he didn’t want to be rude. Sherlock was dying to tell him about them, he could tell by the smirk, he was just waiting for John to ask. Sherlock loved it when John was rude, nosy, or otherwise a bit not good.

Finally, Sherlock let out a disappointed huff. “His hairline, John. Honestly, do your eyes have any purpose?”

John’s eyebrows jumped. “That’s from…”

“Yes, obviously.” Sherlock said, fluffing his own hair with both hands, as if to say _you couldn’’t possibly think it ran in my genes_. The motion was unbearably arousing, Sherlock standing in the middle of a kitchen littered with broken glass and ruffling his own hair like a casual demi-god of destruction. John licked his lips before he could stop himself.

“I’ll just get that, shall I?”

Sherlock looked at him dolefully, stood painfully still while John crouched to get all of the shards away from him, swept into a glittering pile of jagged rubbish.

When he was done, and had had a minute to reel over _Mycroft didn’t make it home for Sherlock to have his first heat, Mycroft missed that chemical change from familial to foreign and his brain would never sort out the difference, Mycroft missed his chance of adhering to the Westermark effect, Mycroft and Sherlock react to each other sexually_ without having to make any sort of eye contact while he sorts that out.

“Thank you for telling me,” John said, calm as always in the eye of the storm, as if Sherlock’s just read him the headline, or passed along a message.  

Sherlock scowled. “I just wanted you to know. Nothing will change unless one of us bonds, and it is unlikely on both fronts. I need you to put all thought of my continued use of suppressants out of mind.”

John made a gesture with his left hand from the side of his face that people typically associated with blowing one’s brains out, but he felt like Sherlock would appreciate it for what it was.

“Having understood that,” Sherlock said, like a business proposal. “I would like to continue the progression of our friendship into something sexual.”

“I’m glad we’re on the same page.”

*

It is only after things emphatically _do not change_ that John questioned what he’d expected.

Sherlock effectively appropriated his body for his own use when they weren’t even friends yet; calling him back to send texts for him and treating him like he might as well be Sherlock’s hat – there to frame Sherlock’s cheekbones and not much else.

John has always been in charge of sustenance, shopping, tedious things like paying bills and hoovering. On further examination of his expectations, John came to at least one conclusion, and that they would be adding “help Sherlock achieve orgasm” to that list.

In the morning after their first case since Sherlock said the words “continue the progression of our friendship into something sexual”out of his _own mouth,_ Sherlock stood with the small of his back against the counter, barefoot, legs crossed near the floor. He looked well rested, flushed with victory, and endearingly sleep-rumpled. John found himself staring at the place where his pajama trousers rode up over the nub of his ankle like some sort of Victorian gentleman with a collar buttoned to his chin.

Sherlock went on blithely slathering his toast with an obscene layer of marmite, and John had a very distinct thought: _I have to kiss Sherlock before he puts that in his mouth._

John Watson, being a man of action,  took two long steps to plant himself in front of Sherlock and pinched his toast by the corner. “May I?” he asked, already pulling it from Sherlock’s hands and setting it down on the counter.

“By all means,” Sherlock said, when the toast was well out of his hand. John held his face in both hands, briefly, looking at Sherlock to make sure his intentions were clear, and Sherlock’s pupils dilated noticeably. John reeled him in, close, and angled his face, hesitating with only millimeters between them.

“John?” Sherlock breathed, the word coming out in a ticklish puff of breath.

“Yes?” John grinned.

Sherlock didn’t answer. He might have mumbled something like, _for God’s sake, John!_ as he crashed into John, sending him staggering back into the other side of the kitchen, effectively pinning him against the fridge. John felt frissons of heat radiating from where Sherlock put his hands—one cupping the nape of his neck and the other against his side, and oh hell, he hadn’t put down his butter knife; there was going to be marmite ground into his favorite top when he regained enough good sense to care. Sherlock dove into his mouth with the energy of the starving, as if he was making a grid of his mouth, and there was the clatter of his butter knife against the kitchen floor. John hardly noticed because he was a bit preoccupied with the fact that he was pinned by his hips against the cold front of the fridge.

Sherlock came up for air, only briefly, before applying his mouth, clever and movile and warm, to John’s neck, down his chest, dropping warm kissed through his tee shirt, to his trousers. Sherlock’s cool fingers worked at the button for them. “I never got to return the favor,” Sherlock said, nuzzling into John’s crotch with his face, and John’s fingers gave a tingle at the redirected blood.

“Please,” John gasped, and Sherlock sucked him into his mouth unceremoniously, his omega prick fitting all the way to the hilt in Sherlock’s mouth, with room for his tongue to swish around his underside with Sherlock’s mouth tight like a smile around the base of him. He came with both hands in Sherlock’s hair and his name in his mouth, feeling weak at the knees and dizzy.

“Well.” he said, when the aftershocks had passed. “That was unexpected.”

Sherlock raised an eyebrow at him. “You made the first move. How was that unexpected?”

“I wasn’t sure if you…? You hadn’t…”

“You’ve been very vocal about your general preference being for omega females. The last time we engaged in amorous behaviors, you were ovulating.”

“Tracking my ovulation schedules?” John said. He hoped his eyebrow conveyed the fact that he found it unamusing.

“It’s not hard to calculate halfway between heats. It’s hardly astrophysics. And I didn’t have to invade your privacy to find out – you told me about the last heat.” Sherlock sounded petulant.

“Very true,” John said, amenable in the wash of chemicals he was feeling for his ridiculous flatmate in the buttery light of recent orgasm, and, more honestly, all the time. “How does that all stack together?”

“Many articles compulsion towards affection during ovulation. After I _expressed a desire_ to continue, you failed to stand closer than necessary, attempt to occupy my bed, or spend any more time staring than usual. So I thought maybe that was to blame.”

John let out a laugh. “Sherlock, you berk! I was trying to be a gentleman. I’m the one who’s libido has never been a question of debate. And, you know, I did go out on a limb and let you know that I am you know, stupidly emotionally invested here.”

“This is tedious.” Sherlock narrowed his eyes at John. “Let me be clear: I am also … extremely fond of you, which is not something I am in the habit of feeling. _Now,_ may I please have a blow job?”

John’s face burst into a smile, premature lines changing into something joyous. “You don’t have to ask me twice,” John said, grabbing him by the wrist. _Extremely fond,_ John’s brain repeated to him in a sing-song voice, like the kind of pop song that made him feel old. _Extremely fond, extremely fond._

By the time he had Sherlock on his back, one flat palm putting a dull pressure against his seam, but not quite in, mouth planted firmly over Sherlock, his hips squirming in gleeful anticipation, his thoughts were still on loop.

“What!” Sherlock demanded, the first time he’d pulled off with a _smack_ to grin at Sherlock, canines set against his bottom lip in an attempt to contain it.

“Extremely fond,” John said, shaking his head fondly, and sank back down.

“You know what I meant,” Sherlock huffed.

“Yes,” he agreed, enunciated as best one can with a mouth full of someone else. He most emphatically did. Something inside of him was soft and sighing, and he traced the letters on Sherlock’s bare, warm hip as he went along, until Sherlock came apart at the seams, like a spilled bowl of sugar. “I do.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A bonding and a hug.

“If there is anyone here who has a reason why these two may not be bonded, speak now, or forever hold your peace.”

The room echoed with quiet like a seashell. John caught Sherlock’s eye and grinned at him, and Sherlock’s eyebrows went up like an insinuation.

 _Don’t you dare,_ John thought, and tried not to laugh.

*

_Much earlier._

John, being in a relationship that made it out of its first three months for the first time since before Afghanistan went off his suppressants shortly after he and Sherlock decided to give it an honest attempt.

John almost spent that first one alone, after Sherlock spent the preceding month alternating between being totally engrossed in his reproductive research and pretending he wasn’t practically spasming with anxiety about it.

“You don’t have to spend it with me,” John said into the dark, the third time Sherlock peeked in to look at him on the night before he was expecting it. Sherlock rarely slept, but when he did, he’d taken to climbing into John’s bed, and not particularly quietly or considerately. Usually, it was a bounce as he insinuated himself into John’s bed and a squeak as he twisted himself like an octopus to put all of his cold appendages against different pockets of heat around John’s person.

The fact that he was quiet in the doorway spoke to nerves, not the intention of sleeping.

“Nonsense,” Sherlock drawled. “You and I are in a…”

John waited a minute, and then made a suggestion, “Relationship?”

“That,” Sherlock confirmed. “And all sorts of idiots seem to be capable of making it through these things unscathed.”

“Very true,” John agreed, sitting up now because he might as well give up on being asleep. “Come here, please.”

Sherlock sent a longing look down the hallway. John, his eyes adjusting to the scant light coming from the bulb there could see _I have an experiment waiting,_ scrawled across his face, bold as a Banksy. Surprisingly, he said, after a moments’ deliberation. “Okay,” and navigated his way into John’s negative space.

“You don’t really fit at the little spoon, Sherlock,” John groused. He’d found out early on that being the big spoon meant he half suffocated against Sherlock’s shoulder blade. Sherlock had suggested John purchase a snorkeling kit, but he’d told him it was too early in their partnership to be bringing such unorthodox props into the bedroom. “Besides. I know you’re too keyed up to sleep.”

John made his way to Sherlock’s thighs, nuzzling the soft cloth of his pajama trousers with the side of his face. “I’m about to forget how much I like this for a few days; might as well remind you now.”

*

Sherlock conceded that sex was only a colossal waste of brain power during _some_ cases and John helped him decide what rankings of cases superseded biological desire.

They argued about sixes. “You can wank through the sixes,” Sherlock insisted.

“Can,” John agreed. “Don’t want to.”

“If there are no new leads in twenty four hours, we can engage in coitus.”

John rolled his eyes, but chalked it down as a personal victory.

*

They’d been through two of John’s heats before the cream invitation came in the mail, and Sherlock sat up straight as he penetrated the envelope with a precise slide of his pen knife. “What’s got you so interested?” John had wondered, looking up from his blog.

“Something impossible,” Sherlock answered.

*

Mycroft’s bonding ceremony was tasteful, expensive, and, to John’s surprise, a lot of fun. Mycroft and Anthea had actually bonded the previous night, Sherlock explained, and John followed behind him on shorter legs and with quicker steps as he sought his brother out before the ceremony.

“Mycroft!” Sherlock greeted, warm towards his brother as John had ever heard him. “And Anthea. You look beautiful. You know it’s still not too late to jump ship.”

Anthea had a low, rumbling laugh, and she patted his cheek affectionately. “Oh, I think maybe it is.”

“Well, let me know if you change your mind. I have a car waiting.”

John shook Mycroft’s hand, and wished he and Anthea the best. “I saw the wedding invitations,” he said, conspiratorially. He gave a little eyebrow wiggle.

Anthea leaned in close to John’s face; she had to bend down to do so. “I’m marrying the British government today,” she whispered, serenely. “Do you think I have put down my original name?”

Sherlock gave a sharp bark of laughter. “That’s my girl,” he said, threading his hand through John’s and leading him away for a drink.

John let him lead them and watched with faint surprise if halfway to the bar, Sherlock made a navigational swerve to deposit them in front of his parents. He’d seen pictures of them, and noticed them in their front row seats during the ceremony, but he hadn’t had a chance to come say hello. Now, he seemed to be presented with that opportunity, suddenly.

“Hello, John,” Sherlock’s mother said, smiling. “We’ve heard almost nothing about you that we didn’t get straight from the horses’ mouth on your blog, what with the fact that no one comes out to visit at all, but you look … interesting enough.” She gave him the once over with a look that was distinctly Holmsian.

“Now, darling.” Sherlock’s father said, tempering, “Don’t be cross with the boy. Sherlock finally has a boyfriend.”

Sherlock pulled a face at the word _boyfriend,_ but didn’t otherwise say anything. John noted that he looked even more like his omega father in person.

“I’m sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Holmes,” John said, sheepishly. “You know the lifestyle. Crime doesn’t sleep.”

Mrs. Holmes tsked at him. “When I was a young alpha,” she said, “I was breaking codes five nights a week and reading for thermodynamics during the day. Do you think that stopped me from dropping by to see my dear old mum?”

Sherlock looked properly red about the face. John, for his part, thought it was charming. “Sorry, mummy.”

“Christmas, then?” She said, managing to sound like a question at the tip of the iceberg, but everyone present was aware that beneath the surface, the issue had been completely resolved. She made proof of that by moving along promptly. “Also, Sherlock, your father has news to deliver,” she informed him, nudging her husband in the ribs none too subtly. John almost laughed at the neon-sign obviousness of his genetic markers for tact and dramatic flair.

“That’s right, my boy,” Mr. Holmes said, shifting a bit as if uncomfortable. “Now that Mycroft is bonded, your mother and I have decided…”

Sherlock’s mouth dropped as he watched his father flounder. “You’re not prescribing me anymore suppressants,” he accused.

Mr. Holmes looked a bit apologetic. “You’ve been suppressing permanently and indefinitely for far longer than is healthy. With Mycroft bonded…” he trailed off, before Mrs. Holmes cut in. “Well, you won’t be trying to hump poor Mikey’s leg anymore when you’re ovulating, so your father won’t need to send you those nasty things.”

“ _Violet!_ ” Mr. Holmes said, much the same way John sounded when Sherlock forgot to pretend to care about tact and timing. As full of second hand embarrassment for him as he was, John was a little chuffed.

He grinned at both of them. “Delightful to meet you both,” he said to Sherlock’s parents, and began to steer him away, “we’ll be up to visit soon, but for now, we need to dance to this song.”

John was not particularly adept at dancing: hadn’t even given it a try in years, but Sherlock looked relieved and cautiously pleased with John for putting some space between themselves and his parents, and John tried his best not to step on Sherlock’s feet.

“They’ll all be downtempo,” Sherlock informed him, as he secured his hands on John, leading with a delicate subtly he usually chose to skip over.

“Why is that?”

“Because bits of Mycroft tend to … jiggle.” Sherlock said, with malicious glee in his voice. “And he’s horrifically embarrassed about it.”

John gave Sherlock a deep frown, but at least he’d kept his voice low. “You’re a prat.” He informed him. “You’ll be old and fat one day.”

“Unlikely,” Sherlock scoffed, and stooped to kiss him on his mouth, just a quick, insolent peck.

John, despite himself, was charmed. Probably Sherlock’s intent. He let Sherlock lead him around the travertine dance floor until the song ended.

*

“Looks like you and I are going to have an upcoming sex holiday as well,” Sherlock said, as the night-do was dying down.

“Do not call _heat_ a _sex holiday,_ ta.” John said. “And not if you’re going to sound so dour about it.”

“My father is _cutting me off._ Like trust fund baby with a heroin addiction.” Sherlock said, indignant, and cutting his eyes to them, across the room, milling about Mycroft’s guests. There were rather a lot of them to be the guests of a man who spent much of his social time in a club known for not allowing its patrons to speak to each other. John wondered briefly if any of them were on payroll. Besides Greg and Mrs. Hudson, John failed to recognize any of them, save two MPs he was particularly informed about.

John thought it might be tactless to ask, but Sherlock _had_ brought it up himself. “And… did they?”

“What, cut me off?” Sherlock said, and John nodded. “You can’t be serious. No, of course not. I’m an omega; they worried if they had, I’d stop buying drugs and start bartering for them.”

John winced. “Ah.” He said, and desperate to change the subject, scanned the room. “Mycroft looks… happy.” His hair was mussed where Anthea kept touching it, and he looked distinctly pink under the romantic lighting.

“Of course he does. He’s just bonded to his most promising underling.”

John’s eyebrows shot to his hairline. “Is that.. uh, what he thinks of her?”

“No,” Sherlock sighed. “He’d probably call her the love of his life.”

“Why take so long then, when his unbonded status caused the two of you so much friction?”

Sherlock looked at him sharply. “Hardly the place or time to mention, John. And you think I’m the one with no grace.”

“Well,” John shrugged defensively.

“If you must know… sexual misalignment slowed the process, I suspect. Anthea is quite keen, but biological drive aside, my brother is generally disinclined. Likely, it took quite some time to negotiate the involvement of a third party.”

“Huh.” John thought about that for a while, until Mycroft and Anthea made their rounds before leaving.

“Brother,” Mycroft said, and Sherlock quirked his mouth up at him, holding out a single hand to shake. Mycroft ignored it in favour of practically lifting his brother into a very physical embrace.

An undignified _oof_ came out of Sherlock as his heels left the floor. “Mycroft!” he whined, and John caught a glimpse of him as a worshipful adolescent with a brother who was practically an adult. Hell, Harry was only four years older than John and he’d always felt like compared to him, she’d sprung from the womb fully-grown. “Put me down!”

Mycroft didn’t answer, instead tucking his nose into his brother’s hair to get a deep whiff.

“How do I smell?” Sherlock asked, voice muffled by the warm heft of Mycroft.

Mycroft gave a deep laugh. “Utterly unexceptional,” he said, setting him down, and both brothers smiled, genuine and with no bitter edge. It was quite unsettling to see.

John stuck out his hand while Sherlock gave Anthea a kiss to the cheek.

“Please don’t pick me up,” he said, and Mycroft laughed again, shaking his hand.

The party seemed to go on without them, and after half an hour Sherlock and John slipped out.

*

“Sex holiday,” John said, later.

“Shh. Sleeping.” Sherlock said, from the other side of the bed, rapidly clattering at his computer, probably writing up the nuances between synthetic pheromone brands.

“Am not,” John said. “Also. I’ve thought of something.”

“Call the Evening Standard,” Sherlock said, with an audible eye roll.

“Har. Lestrade left before Anthea and Mycroft did, yeah?”

Sherlock didn’t look away from the task at hand, which was, when John leaned over, some kind of estrus research. “Precisely ten minutes,” Sherlock confirmed absently.

“Huh,” John said. “That’s… something.”

“Yes,” Sherlock agreed, tabbing into another window, which seemed to be a forum about coming off of suppressants. “Please stop thinking about it. Go back to thinking about our sex holiday. We’re bound to have one within six weeks.”

John closed his eyes again, snuggling fondly into Sherlock’s side. He was still sitting up on crossed legs, the edge of a knee poking deep into John’s warm belly, and John reached one hand over to press his palm over Sherlock’s soft cock, like a friendly, sleepy snuggle. “Mmm,” John mumbled, pressing his face to Sherlock’s hip. “Alright, then.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for all of the love; I wouldn't have stuck it out without your support. I don't have any plans for a smutty coda at the moment, but never say never. :)


End file.
